Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children:

On resentment, partition, and forming identities…

Cody Valdes
E.P.I.I.C. ~ South Asia
December 2009
 Through the turbulent world of Saleem Sinai, child of India born on the stroke of

midnight on August 15, 1947, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children explores the

universal conflicts and pains of maturation that the Indian subcontinent endured in the

years after partition. Painting an illustrious weave that binds Saleem’s fate to that of the

fledging Indian nation, Rushdie provides a poignant commentary on the legacy of the

British intrusion and of undivided India’s subsequent devolution into a land of destructive

nationalisms and resentment. Beginning with serene purity of early twentieth century

Kashmir, Saleem traces his history through the fateful optimism of Nehru’s Congress and

the wars that brought death upon the subcontinent, culminating in the deleterious

invocation of Emergency rule under Indira Gandhi. The fantasy of Saleem’s childhood is

remarkably evocative of the subcontinent’s identity, for the themes of ineluctable destiny,

resentment, and unity of kin that find universal resonance in childhood factor prominently

in the historical realities of twentieth century South Asia. Amid the calamity of India’s

adolescence, Rushdie forces the reader to reexamine the circumstances of partition and

question whether, despite the current enmity of India and Pakistan, such a solution ever

made sense for the people of the subcontinent.

Amid the natural beauty of Princely Kashmir, Rushdie begins his fateful journey –

and that of Saleem – with the prefatory tale of his grandfather, Doctor Aadam Aziz.

Returning from five years of medical training abroad, Aziz discovers “through travelled

eyes” a Kashmir that he can hardly recall: “Instead of the beauty of the tiny valley circled

by giant teeth, he noticed the narrowness, the proximity of the horizon; and felt sad, to be

at home and feel so utterly enclosed.” (5) Aziz returned in 1915, at the height of what has

been called India’s moment of awakening and the transition to the point of mobilization,

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that seed of Gandhi’s agitation for Hind Swaraj that would soon engulf the subcontinent

in a widespread assertion against the British colonials. Unlike Gandhi, however, whose

vision for India rested upon an idealized notion of a golden era of simplicity and the

centrality of the village, Aziz’ purview of his homeland was jaded by exposure to the

western world. Nevertheless, he heeds the dragooning request of the local landowner

Ghani to examine young Naseem, Ghani’s perpetually ailing daughter. With his patient

hidden behind an “enormous white bed sheet” held aloft by two burly women, Aziz is

given only a “crude circle about seven inches in diameter” through which to examine

young Naseem, whose particular ailments are eclectic enough that Aziz can develop a

scattered mental mosaic of her delicate body over time. Bounded by the cultural

sensitivities of this exceedingly particularistic patriarch, who we might liken to Aziz’

colonial overseer, a conservative ethic of Indian society, or the self-doubts that

undoubtedly crossed the minds of India’s great reformers, the doctor finds his task made

infinitely more difficult, as the deceptively opaque bed sheet that separates the two has

prevented his understanding of the patient as a whole.

Doctor Aziz’s struggle to conduct a proper administration of his medical services

to Ghani’s daughter, Saleem’s future grandmother, symbolizes a greater struggle of

Indian nationalist leaders at the point of their push for independence. The parallels

between the Doctor and men like Jinnah and Nehru, between his interaction with Naseem

and theirs with the budding Indian nation, are unmistakable: western educated,

intelligent, yet partially out of touch with the baffling insistence of an authoritative

overseer, Aziz must ‘discover’ his young female patient through a “badly-fitting collage”

of her body, feeling blindly behind a white veil for clues that reveal the cause of her

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weakness. Though he succeeds in curing for good each of her ailments, young Naseem

never fails to produce a new sickness for him to puzzle blindly over, a pattern that will

mire Aziz in a Sisyphean cycle as long as the veil is there. The veil is thus the prism – or

prison – that binds his capacity to prescribe a remedy and that renders his years of

haughty medical education moot; the veil is that which prevents the whole from emerging

out of a thousand tiny parts; the veil, one could say, represents the social constructs that

divide nations and decapitate shared identities in gestation; the veil is religion, class, and

caste, held aloft by muscular Indian women at the behest of the stoic patriarch. By the

time the British initiated its census-by-religion in 1919, the veil had been caste upon the

subcontinent’s people and justification for Partition some 28 years later had begun to take

root.

With the story of Doctor Aziz as a backdrop, Rushdie proceeds to weave the tale

of Saleem’s birth and British India’s sudden dissolution into India and Pakistan. Infusing

his account with a poignant commentary on the role of destiny in India’s partition, the

author questions the very meaning of this fateful day in the subcontinent’s history.

Distancing ourselves from Rushdie’s fantasy, we turn to the realities of partition, the

intentions of its main actors, and its many meanings for the people of British India.

Without such an understanding, the many absurdities of Saleem’s world risk being

mistaken for unfortunate, but inescapable, characteristics of South Asian society.

1947, Saleem and Shiva, and the Inevitable Children

“Thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously
handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country…” –
Saleem

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 1947 is the most cataclysmic and defining year in the history of the Indian

subcontinent, both for the geopolitical legacy of British India’s partition and the

tremendous loss of life and community it entailed for nearly 20 million people. But today

it is not always treated as such; seen through the prism of chauvinistic nationalism or

religious communalism, both Indians and Pakistanis are wont to shift the blame for

partition to Britain’s policy of divide and rule and the insensible determinations of a

unified and separate Muslim community, while the atrocities committed by Sikhs, Hindus

and Muslims are left to fester as myths of ideologically-constructed histories. While

surviving Muslims who were forced to abandon their homes in eastern Punjab and

western Bengal and flee to the new state of Pakistan recall the pain of their journey in

vivid detail, particularly remembering the daughters they lost and the Hindu and Sikh

brothers they were torn from, partition is somehow treated as a ‘victory’ for British

India’s Muslims. Did partition not, so goes the argument, result in a brand new state

through which a religiously unified Muslim nation could pursue an Islamic political

agenda? While the despotic and Islamic rule of General and President Zia al Huq a

generation later would seem to validate such a notion, this was hardly the objective or the

vision of Pakistan’s founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Saleem’s father, Ahmed

Sinai, “distrusted Muhammad Ali Jinnah” not because of his malicious intent to divide

the subcontinent, but because of the opportunism and selfishness Sinai saw in the eyes of

men like Major Zulfikar, who “had been writing letters saying, ‘You must decide for

Pakistan when it comes, as it surely will. It’s certain to be a goldmine for men like us.”

(91)

Rather than a unified Muslim polity, partition gave Jinnah control of the same

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recalcitrant, particularistic provinces that he ostensibly represented prior to 1947. By

demarcating India’s population along religious lines, British colonialists ensured the

emergence of individuals claiming to represent their own religions. The result was that

individual Muslims, primarily landed elites, claimed to speak on behalf of their regional

Muslim communities despite their obvious class objectives.1 This explains the reluctance

of Punjab property owners to embrace an all-India Muslim party during the 1920s and

instead to form an agriculture party with their fellow Hindus and Sikhs.2 If religious

communalism was the greatest motivator of British India’s Muslims, then the need for a

strong all-India Muslim voice would have been widely recognized and the Muslim

League and Jinnah might have garnered more than the 4.4 percent of votes in the 1936/7

elections. Instead, Punjab and Bengal were more interested in the British ideas of

federalism and provincial autonomy put forth in the 1935 Government of India Act. Only

after World War II did these provinces come to resent British rule and align themselves

with the all-India Muslim League.

Winning 75 percent of the vote in the Muslim-majority provinces and all of the

reserved seats at the all-India level in the 1945 elections, Jinnah’s Muslim League was

given new impetus to demand protection for the Muslim communities from Congress and

the Viceroy. By the Lahore Agreement in 1940, the Muslim Leaguers had adopted the

idea of a Muslim Nation in their discourse, but they were much more ambiguous about

the idea of a Muslim state. Jinnah actively sought to present himself as the sole

spokesperson for India’s 95 million Muslims in the years leading up to partition, despite
1
Aside from class differences, Bengali Muslims were clearly divided between the localized, indigenous
blend of Hindu, Muslim, and Sufism, and the “urban-based, foreign-born Islamic elite who strongly resisted
assimilation into indigenous Bengali culture.” Naila Kabeer, “The Quest for National Identity: Women,
Islam, and the State in Bangladesh,” in Deniz Kandiyoti, ed, Women, Islam, and the State (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1991), 118.
2
Lecture, Ayesha Jalal. November 16, 2009.

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the competing agendas of his co-religionists living in Muslim-majority provinces

(Punjab, Bengal) and those rooted in provinces where Muslims were minority. It was

religion, according to Bose and Jalal, which “came to Jinnah’s rescue, less as a device to

be deployed against rival communities, and more as a way of papering over the cracks in

the splintered ranks of Muslim India.”3 As a tool for political mobilization, Islam was

unparalleled; but as a driving ideology of the movement for Pakistan, Islam itself was

hardly the primary factor.

But Jinnah could not ensure the partition of India alone, nor did the idea appeal to

him in the slightest. In his calls for a unified state post-independence, he was as strong an

“Indian nationalist” as Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi, V.P. Menon and the rest of

his Congress counterparts, despite the vociferous demands for provincial autonomy of his

constituent leaders in Punjab and Bengal. Never able to give a clear vision for the

geographical and political makeup of his Pakistan, he puttered along with the ambiguous

objective of “achieving an equal say for Muslims in [an] all-India arrangement at the

center.”4 Jinnah’s hopes lied in his ability to convince British Viceroy Lord Mountbatten

and the Congress that India’s Muslims were, as a whole, greater than the sum of their

parts; in other words, he attempted to promulgate a vision of a separate (and unified)

Muslim nation within the Indian state, claiming the backing of what he knew to be a

contradicted Muslim base. Jinnah agitated for control over the Muslim majority provinces

that were contiguous to modern day Pakistan, including Punjab, Bengal, Baluchistan,

North West Frontier Provinces, and Sindh. This ran counter to the “powerful

provincialism” that “lay behind the demands of most groups in Muslim provinces” like

3
Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia, 159.
4
Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge:
University Press, 1985), 241.

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Assam and Bengal, who were wary of a strong center no matter which party held rule.5

Jinnah’s demand for Pakistan did not entail the partition of Muslim-majority Punjab and

Bengal, two hearts of Indian productivity and human capital.6 Knowing that his vision for

Pakistan left out nearly 40 percent of India’s minority Muslims, Jinnah proposed to keep

Punjab and Bengal unified so that, through a reciprocal arrangement, his minority

coreligionists in India (or Hindustan, as he proposed it be called) would receive the same

fair treatment as these provinces’ Hindu and Sikh minorities would under Pakistan.7

Jinnah’s insistent demands for parity in Hindu-Muslim representation were

questionable in one way. Maybe Muslim-majority provinces felt they "cannot accept"

Gandhi's vision of a Constituent Assembly, for they were opposed to any such

reinforcement of the state's central powers, but Jinnah was perhaps wrong to repackage

this demand as the demand of a distinguishable Muslim nation fighting for communal

representation, which was ultimately a false construction of the colonial British and

ignored the highly integrated nature of local society between Muslims and non-Muslims.8

In this way, Jinnah’s lack of trust for Gandhi’s vision of political inclusiveness, which

was admittedly reinforced by the Muslim experience in Congress-dominated provinces,9

propelled the communal divide in India. But perhaps the train of religious division had
5
Ibid., 180.
6
According to Jinnah, “Pakistan without Calcutta would be like asking a man to live without his heart.”
Ibid., 179.
7
Jinnah’s insistence on popular democracy and equal treatment under a secular Pakistani government was
meant to “[take] the sting out of the League’s communal propaganda.” Ibid., 277.
8
Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, Foundations of Pakistan: All-India Muslim League Documents: 1906-1947
(Karach: National Publishing House, 1970), 335. Jinnah’s assessment was in reaction to that of Lala Lajpat
Rai, who claimed, “Hindu-Mohammedan unity…is neither possible nor practicable.” He went on to claim,
despite centuries of shared history and culture: “The Hindus and the Muslims…neither intermarry, nor
interdine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on
conflicting ideas and conceptions.”
9
Jinnah’s address to the Twenty-seventh Session of the Muslim League in Lahore, March 1940: “From the
experiences of the past two and a half years of Provincial Constitution in the Congress-governed
provinces… we are now, therefore, very apprehensive and can trust nobody.” Pirzada, Foundations of
Pakistan, 330.

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already gathered too much momentum.

Ultimately, however, it was a stubborn Congress and a hurried Mountbatten that

precluded the emergence of a unified state with regional power and minority protections,

as the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 originally would have ensured, but Congress can

hardly be blamed either for wanting control over a strong, centralized state in the

aftermath of Britain’s departure. Without powers to reign in the 40 percent of its territory

that was ruled as princely states, Congress would have faced a potential loss of land far

greater than the 25 percent it eventually conceded to Jinnah’s Pakistan. Congress sought

to hasten the transfer of British power by accepting Dominion Status from a (now self-

congratulatory) Mountbatten, leaving the fate of Punjab and Bengal’s for later when they

would “see that they had more to gain by ditching Jinnah and the demand for Pakistan.”10

The loss of the Muslim provinces was a difficult price to pay for India’s independence,

but one that a group of “tired men,” as Nehru blithely remarked, were eventually willing

to concede. But the divisions that Britain had sown as early as 1909 were the true origins

of India’s partition; in Rushdie’s tale it was the colonial William Methwold who “had a

head of thick black brillianted hair, parted in the center… one of those hairlines along

which history and sexuality moved.” (105) Indeed, Rushdie described the forces behind

partition succinctly, albeit with a stronger emphasis on Jinnah’s role than might be

warranted: “Among the parents of midnight: the failure of the Cabinet Mission scheme;

the determination of M.A. Jinnah, who was dying and wanted to see Pakistan formed in

his lifetime, and would have done anything to ensure it… and Mountbatten with his

extraordinary haste and his chicken-breast-eater of a wife...” (121)

In the end, the winning of Muslim statehood was inimical to the interests and
10
Ibid., 270.

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vision of the greater Muslim nation. Rather than the two-nation-under-one-state solution

that Jinnah had demanded all along, he received the “moth eaten” Pakistan that he had

twice rejected in 1944 and 1946 from Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari and Congress.11

Indeed, the fact that approximately 40 percent of British India’s Muslims were “left high

and dry inside a country over which their more numerous co-religionists to the east and

west had no influence,” forces one to question whether today’s Pakistan can be fully

justified.12 For the Muslims of Sind, NWFP, and Baluchistan, whose only common

feature was a “fierce attachment to their particularistic traditions, and a deep antipathy to

any central control,” the events of 1947 thrust them “willy-nilly… under the tight central

control which Pakistan had to impose if it was to survive,” 13 evincing the deep

resentment towards Islamabad that persists in these regions today. Moreover, Sir Cyril

Radcliffe’s partition of Punjab, which was allegedly influenced by a pro-India

Mountbatten to place three northeastern districts in India’s possession despite their

Muslim-majority populations and their contiguity with the future Pakistan, would soon

allow India direct military access to the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir and control

of headwaters that flowed into Pakistan through the Punjab.14

Jinnah’s political emphasis on religious nationhood, combined with the horrific

violence following partition that was cloaked in purely communal terms,15 explains the

11
Jalal, Lecture. November 16, 2009.
12
Pirzada, Foundations of Pakistan., 3.
13
Jalal, Sole Spokesman, 3.
14
Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within (Oxford: University Press,
2008), 39-40. The significance of Radcliffe’s decision, and of this particular moment of the subcontinent’s
partition, for the future of Pakistan’s security cannot be overstated. The Indus River feeds the agricultural
breadbasket of Pakistan and the Kashmir conflict has become the flashpoint between the two nuclear
powers, not to mention a massive drain of state resources that could otherwise have remained in the
provinces.
15
The motivations of those who committed these atrocities were more opportunistic than ideological,
though there were undoubtedly instances where religious fervor supplemented the clamoring for “zam, zar,
and zamin,” or women, wealth, and land. Lecture, Ayesha Jalal, November 21, 2009.

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prevailing bitterness in the discourse of Indian nationalists and Hindu majoritarians

towards his purported role in dividing Gandhi’s nation. From the perspective of post-

partition Pakistani nationalists, who were forced to seek justification for their own

country’s existence in the history of partition, Jinnah’s work was seen as a triumph for a

politically and religiously oppressed minority, and it would be inconceivable to suggest

otherwise. But a sober look at the realities of post-partition Pakistan forces one to

question this premise. For Indian nationalists, Jinnah’s role as the divisive thorn in India’s

independence movement was a source of resentment and regional enmity, despite his

sincere attempts to keep the subcontinent united.

As the birth of Saleem Sinai and his counterpart Shiva approaches at the midnight

hour of August 15, Rushdie brings part one of Midnight’s Children to a close with the

revelation that partition was not as inextricably tied to the wheels of destiny as one might

think: William Methwold’s divisive hair was, after all, merely a hairpiece. “Samson-like,

William Methwold’s power had resided in his hair; but now, bald patch glowing in the

dusk… he distributes, with what looks like carelessness, the signed title-deeds to his

palaces; and drives away. Nobody at Methwold’s Estate ever saw him again; but I, who

never saw him once, find him impossible to forget.” (127) Nor was there any method to

the madness of partition, for the pampered life that Saleem would enjoy as a child was

made possible only by the arbitrary, impulsive decision of midwife Mary Pereira to swap

Shiva and Saleem’s nametags at birth. The former, born most unnaturally (for babies

never have kneecaps) with a set of knees capable of suffocating full grown men, and the

latter, with a nose worthy of a name of its own, would soon become bitter rivals as their

paths diverged. “So: there were knees and a nose, a nose and knees. In fact, all over the

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new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the

offspring of their parents – the children of midnight were also the children of the time:

fathered, you understand, by history… in a country which is itself a sort of dream.” (132)

And so the Midnight Children Conference, a cerebral connection among the supernatural

children of partition, was born in the mind of Saleem.

Nose, Knees, and Rival Siblings

“It probably didn't matter; Shiva - implacable, traitorous, my enemy from our
birth - would have found me in the end. Because although a nose is uniquely equipped for
the purpose of sniffing-things-out, when it comes to action there's no denying the
advantages of a pair of grasping, choking knees” – Saleem

In the post-Partition life of Saleem, the fantasies of childhood are product of the

many inherent absurdities of his gestation, just as the conflict of his adolescence is

product of the many paradoxes of his maturation. Bludgeoned by the legacy of partition,

Saleem, like the land to which his identity is forever moored, is thrust into adolescence

with the lurking realization that his optimistic fantasy world is incompatible with the

realities of a sub-continental diamond torn asunder. Jawaharlal Nehru declared, “This is

no time for petty or destructive criticism… No time for ill-will. We have to build the

noble mansion of free India, where all her children may dwell.” (131) But for Saleem and

the subcontinent, the ostensible sense of infinite possibility that followed their birth is

eventually replaced by a festering, overwhelming, and internecine emotion of resentment.

In Saleem’s words, “From the earliest days of my… adolescence, I began to learn the

secret aromas of the world, the heady but quick-fading perfume of new love, and also the

deeper, longer-lasting pungency of hate.” (352)

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 Resentment became a defining feature of the Shiva-Saleem, Pakistan-India

relationship, if it can be called such a thing, particularly as the countries embarked on

seemingly disparate paths after independence. By the time military-dominated Pakistan

had held its first general elections in 1970, for example, India had established a solid

track record of regular elections under universal adult suffrage. Pakistan, conversely,

emerged from partition under the tenuous authority of its ailing civilian leadership and

immediately at war with India – Shiva flexing his kneecaps! – over the unaddressed state

of Jammu and Kashmir. The strain of provincial dissidence would quickly lead to the

demise of Karachi’s civilian power and push Pakistan into the iron rule of Ayub Khan’s

military in 1958. However, even in state structures and political tensions the two shared

more in common than is commonly acknowledged. While formally democratic India

appeared to fare better than military dominated Pakistan in addressing the problem of

central power and regional dissidence, this surface assessment masks the underlying

congruencies of their post-partition trajectories. As Rushdie remains deliberately

ambiguous about the association between Shiva the destroyer and both Pakistan and

India, implying a similarity of identity between the latter two, the notion that the twin

themes of centralism and regionalism, nationalism and communalism, and democracy

and authoritarianism informed social and political tensions in radically different ways in

India and Pakistan is a point of question for Rushdie.

Out of imperial necessity, the 1909 Morley-Minto reforms imposed religious

categorization as the mechanism of the British Raj’s ‘divide and rule’ strategy. The

reforms granted British Indian landowners representation in various legislative councils,

but they also allotted separate electorates for India’s Muslim minorities. The fact that

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India and Pakistan were born along the arbitrary lines of religion four decades later would

mean that alternative identities based on regionalism, caste, language, and ethnicity were

relegated to the second tier of political importance, from whence they would suppurate

tremendous civil unrest in the ensuing decades. In both countries, this unrest would take

the form of communal violence and regional assertion by provinces demanding greater

autonomy and a fair share of national resources. For the leaders of Pakistan, the task of

reigning in what one might call “rogue” provinces of Baluchistan, NWFP, and Sindh with

one hand while securing their grip on the far-off province of Eastern Pakistan with the

other would prove a gargantuan task, one that would ostensibly need the overt

authoritarian rule of the military for 38 years of the country’s 62 year existence.

For India, regional dissidence was no less of a thorn in the central government’s

side and would frequently be quelled through the same heavy-handed use of armed

forces, but the sanctity of elections would ensure the survival of the state’s democratic

process. Indeed, while the loss of East Pakistan in 1971 gave Pakistan the unfortunate and

“unenviable distinction of being the only country in the post-colonial world to have

experienced a successful secessionist movement,”16 conflict between center and periphery

was enormous in India as well, despite the rapidity with which Nehru was able to

institutionalize the processes of formal democracy. According to Sugata Bose and

Ayesha Jalal: “Independence from colonial rule was claimed by the Congress as the

triumph of centralism and nationalism. Yet the creation of a Pakistan had underlined the

partial success of regionalism and religious communitarianism.”17 As the luster of

Nehru’s vision for a peaceful rebirth after two hundred years of colonialism, where

16
Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical
Perspective (Cambridge: University Press, 1995), 183.
17
Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia, 167.

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Pakistanis and Indians share “good [or] ill fortune alike,” waned with time, Saleem’s

India became engulfed by war, conflict, and other manifestations of the self-fulfilling

national resentment that was rooted in colonial intervention. The moorings of India’s

democracy could have easily fallen apart given the enormous strain India was under to

quell regional uprisings and dissidence in the Northeastern and Southern provinces of,

among others, Assam and Tamil Nadu.18 So while on paper and in relation to India,

Pakistan appears to have failed as a post-colonial experiment in democracy, the

difference between overt democracy and authoritarianism has often been Lilliputian in

India, while the scourge of chauvinism and communalism has spared neither country.

The evolution of center-region, secular-communal, and civil-military relations in

both India and Pakistan after partition was in many ways a matter of ideas: who had the

monopoly on ideas and how that monopoly was exercised. In neither country could the

main political party claim to speak on behalf of its entire constituent population, but

India’s Congress party fared much better than Pakistan’s Muslim League in rallying

around the idea of a strong central government and driving home the message that there

would be no further partitioning of Indian territory. This was partly made possible by, as

Jinnah astutely predicted, India’s inheritance of the name India and not the appellation

Hindustan.19 Bequeathed a nominal colonial legacy that symbolized democracy, the idea

of an independent India rested on an expectation of continuity, perseverance, and unity

throughout the twentieth century. For Pakistan on the other hand, rather than emerging on

18
Arguably, it did, given the strident reliance on its military to quell regional dissidence in provinces such
as Assam, Nagaland, Mizoland, Punjab, and Kashmir. The people of these regions could hardly have been
said to live under a democratic contract with the Indian state.
19
Of course, India also benefited from the physical trappings of the British Indian administrative
bureaucracy and central institutions – a far cry above the tents from which Pakistan’s central leadership was
forced to operate and exert control over their rebellious provinces. Ayesha Jalal, Lecture, November 30,
2009.

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equal existential footing beside a sovereign Hindustan, its birth was seen as an act of

secession by virtue of India’s nomenclature. India’s constitution, which ironically drew

the majority (68 percent) of its stipulations from the once-maligned Government of India

Act of 1935, was unitary in substance but presented a façade of federalism to appease its

dissenting provinces.20 With searing memories of the communal atrocities that erupted

during partition, Indian politicians of all stripes were precluded from agitating on

religious grounds.21 However, the voice of secularism was increasingly drowned out by

ideas of Hindu majoritarianism and Sikh separatism (branded as communalism)

embodied by parties such as the Shiv Sena and the Akali Dal, and by the 1960s, the ruling

Congress Party had “began to play the Hindu communal card for electoral gains” as

well.22 But while religious affiliations are politicized in state- and increasingly province-

level rhetoric, at the community level, children, mothers, and elders continue to reject

inter-communal hostility.

For Pakistan, the immediate factors threatening its survival as a secular

democracy were a lack of a strong center (from which could grant provincial autonomy);

weak organization of the Muslim League party in the territories; a shifting balance of

power, domestic and internationally, towards the unelected branches of the military and

bureaucracy; and a gulf between the 17.5 percent of British India’s financial assets it

received and the enormous defense spending required to secure its borders with hostile

neighbors.23 But a disjunction of ideas between the fledging Pakistan army and the

political leadership under Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan eventually brought the

20
Lecture, Ayesha Jalal, November 30, 2009.
21
Lecture, Jalal, December 2, 2009.
22
Amrita Chhachhi, “Forced Identities: the State, Communalism, Fundamentalism and Women in India,”
in Deniz Kandiyoti, ed, Women, Islam, and the State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 151.
23
Ibid.

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democratic house of cards down in 1958. The Kashmir War experience of 1947-8 left

Pakistan’s military commanders bitter at the perceived inadequateness of the civilian

politicians, marking the “beginnings of Bonapartism in Pakistan’s polity” and furthering

the ideological distance between the elected and non-elected bodies, who were already

separated by a vast stretch of land.24 The idea of a “secular state in which all men are free

to pursue their own religious sensibilities” that Jinnah had propounded until his death was

clearly dismantled by Zia ul-Haq’s Islamization agenda in the late 1970s, but even he

“had to contend with… Pakistan’s regional and linguistic diversities [which posed] major

impediments to the imposition of doctrinal Islam as the only authentic basis for cultural

unity.”25 Unlike in India, Pakistan’s military leaders utilized religion both as their raison

d’être and their divine mandate for quelling regional dissidence.26 In this way,

authoritarianism and Islamism were inextricable.

The dialogue between centralism, religious majoritarianism, and authoritarianism in

both India and Pakistan (and after 1971, Bangladesh) has been a variable one since the

partition of British India, but the three ideas have remained inextricably linked. While

regional demands have often been branded as communal, like in the case of Punjab’s

24
During the confrontation with Indian armed forces over disputed Kashmir immediately after partition,
members of the army’s higher command pushed the leadership in Karachi to capitalize on India’s weakness
and expand Pakistan’s involvement in the war, but to little avail. Chief among the Pakistan army’s
aggressors was none other than the British army chief of Pakistan, General Sir Douglas Gracey, who was
motivated by as much nationalism as any Pakistani could have said to have been. With the army’s General
Headquarters in Rawalpindi and the politicians’ in Karachi, there was a fateful lack of interface between
the two branches of the Pakistan state. According to Shuja Nawaz, “Kashmir became both a reason for not
allowing a democratic polity to emerge and a massive financial hemorrhage for the new nation state.” Shuja
Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within (Oxford: University Press, 2008), 73.
25
Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia, 329. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Zia’s
predecessor, was also heavily invested in the idea of an Islamic socialist republic, as the 1973 Constitution
shows.
26
“In the words of the late President, Zia-ul Haq, ‘Take Islam out of Pakistan and make it a secular state; it
would collapse.’” Naila Kabeer, “The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam, and the State in
Bangladesh,” in Kandiyoti, Women, Islam, and the State, 117-8. But Nehru too was at times passive when
it came to secularism, as when he permitted the continuation of the Muslim personal law and rejected a
unified civil code in 1954.

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Akali Dal, it was often the state that embraced the majority religion for deterring

provincial dissidence, with the additional support of a strong military. But the distinction

between India’s democracy and Pakistan’s dictatorships seems less and less as their

coeval emergence from British rule is scrutinized. If Saleem was supposed to be the

human embodiment of a fledging India, the arbitrariness of Mary Pereira’s crime negates

the notion, in Rushdie’s mind, that new nations were born in the early hours of August

15, 1947. Is Shiva taken to be Saleem’s Pakistan, or vice versa? Can Saleem conclusively

decide on which side of the border he belongs? Rushdie’s calculated ambiguity regarding

Shiva’s allegiance discards this debate as spurious and deleterious.

Decolonizing the Mind27

In the playground of his childhood, Saleem succumbs to snakes and clambers up

ladders, but like a bird chasing after a setting sun, he remains oblivious to the world

beneath his feet spinning him eastward against his chosen destiny. Saleem’s fantastical

(was the Midnight’s Children Conference real? Perhaps it does not matter, or perhaps

Saleem and the Indian nation never had the chance to nurture the blissful aspirations of

their youth) cadre of cerebrally-connected peers is dismantled by his parents’ desire that

he should grow up (the forced cleansing of his Deccan-sized nose) and the nation’s

industrial maturation (the arrival of telecommunications). Saleem, becoming increasingly

bitter and resentful at the same time that “Indo-Pakistani relations deteriorated,” (363)

internalizes the ugly, unintended side effects of overcoming the “optimism disease,”

which was always the shortcoming of Nehru’s grand vision. Rushdie is simply asking

27
I owe the name and idea of this title to Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal. From Bose and Jalal, Modern
South Asia (New York: Routledge, 2004).

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whether that youthful optimism deserved to be put to rest for the sake of conformity –

conformity to modernity, to colonially defined communal divisions – and whether

partition was as unavoidable as the current bitterness would suggest.

Given what is known today about the history of communal relations in Mughal

and early-British India, Pakistan was not the ‘inevitable’ or ‘natural’ outcome of an

always and forever divided people. One of the saddest casualties of the divisive 20th

century for the subcontinent was the long-held notion, dating back to the Mughal and

even the Mauryan period, that Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and Tribals;

northerners, southerners, easterners, and westerners; and speakers of every language

imaginable could thrive under a common banner. From the great Mughal emperor Akbar,

whose insistence on the virtuousness of all religions led him to create his own synthetic

religion, the “Din-ilahi,” (which sadly peaked at a following of 80, mostly from Akbar’s

own court),28 to the visionary Mohammed Ali Jinnah, for whom a unified India was the

only satisfactory outcome of Britain’s departure from the subcontinent, the idea of

plurality and accommodation at the top and bottom of society was a pillar of South Asian

society. As Amartya Sen has noted:

The history of India does indeed contain many nightmarish elements, but it
also includes conversations and discussions, and extensive joint efforts in
literature, music, painting, architecture, jurisprudence and a great many other
creative activities. And it has included ways and means of allowing people
of dissimilar convictions to live peacefully together rather than going
constantly for each other’s jugular.29

Partition was thus a failure of imagination; a failure to accommodate difference,

to share power within the context of a post-colonial India, and to reject the sacrosanct

reverence of state sovereignty, which was confused for autonomy. For millennia, there

28
Sen, The Argumentative Indian, 41-42; and Ayesha Jalal, Lecture, Tufts University, September 23, 2009.
29
Sen, The Argumentative Indian, 59.

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was always a useful compromise between center and region, Hindu and Muslim ruler,

until for the first moment in the subcontinent’s history lines were drawn and walls were

irrevocably erected. The idea of sovereignty has cast a dark shadow on South Asia, for

British India’s foremost nationalists failed to question the hypocrisy of their wholesale

adoption of this divisive western concept. The idea of a monolithic, non-negotiable,

hegemonic Indian sovereignty, which was taken verbatim from the British pantheon of

thought, was exactly the colonial system that anti-colonialists were ostensibly rejecting.

South Asian nations, in their cultish devotion to the sacrosanct idea of sovereignty, have

mired themselves in rigid conflicts while the rest of the world has largely moved on.30

The trend in Britain and Western Europe, ironically, has been towards accommodation

and flexibility, as the Good Friday agreement and the evolution of the European Union

have shown. In addition, literature, art, clothing, music, and food have never failed to

disregard the borders of the subcontinent. Only when we become complacent with

received identities can the lunacy of conflict-bound national narratives take root.

Though the alcoholism of Saleem’s father is only partly explored by the author,

the spiritual tremors of his tryst with djinns and of partitioned India’s tryst with destiny

intersect in powerful ways. Nations at war, like individuals in addiction, have enemies

that they must overcome, but particularly difficult for the addict is the fact that the enemy

cannot be defeated, removed, or even resisted. The enemy of the addict is the addict

himself. The addict must find a way to recognize and let go of his resentments towards

himself - the process of embracing, and ultimately loving his enemy – if he has any

chance of survival. Likewise, a conflicted nation must reconcile with its past and expunge

the demons of its inner enemy, and thus grant itself the ability to transcend its spiritual
30
Ayesha Jalal, Lecture, Tufts University, December 9, 2009.

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void and free itself of deep-rooted resentments. If it fails, what reemerges is conflict and

perpetual hate, both from within and without. The outcome of resentment for the addict is

spiritual death. What is the outcome for two countries, whose nationalisms are based on

mutual hatred, when they fail to let go of their resentments, or when the vision of a

Gandhi or a Nehru is forgotten? For Rushdie, the outcome is recurring war and the

authoritarian politics of Indira Gandhi.

Accordingly, the aspirations of the Indian nation seem less sincere in its late

adolescence. The Indira-Congress’ imperative of asserting draconian rule and dominance

over the Indian people and the archrival Pakistan, Rushdie wryly hints, is counterintuitive

to the agenda of “Garibi Hatao, Get Rid of Poverty.” (408) Indeed, the only thing

separating Indira from India in an “r,” and that “r” stands for resentment. It is a

resentment that breeds hate, anger, and jealousy; one that forbids love of self by imposing

Emergency rule on one’s people; one that digs deeper the well, bequeathed to India from

the British, from which every last drop of nationalistic hatred towards Pakistan is drawn,

deep below the earth where nuclear devices are exploded and ahimsa is in scarce supply.

It takes a tremendous amount of spiritual fortitude to embrace one’s enemy with

love and not enmity. This is not inimical to defending one’s nation; in fact, this is the

only sanctified route to this end. If Rushdie’s highly imaginative (and unfortunately

timeless) fantasy instills one message in the reader, it is that the subcontinent’s

devolution into an imbroglio of international and intra-national divisions was as

arbitrarily predetermined as Mary Pereira’s original crime, and that only a proper

recognition of the absurdity of this eternal conflict will free the subcontinent of the

resentments that inform today’s national identities.

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Works Cited

Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Chhachhi, Amrita. “Forced Identities: the State, Communalism, Fundamentalism and
Women in India.” In Deniz Kandiyoti, Ed. Women, Islam, and the State.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.
Jalal, Ayesha. Lectures. Tufts University. September to December, 2009.
--- “The Convenience of Subservience: Pakistan.” In Kandiyoti, Ed. Women, Islam, and
the State. . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.
--- Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical

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 Perspective. Cambridge: University Press, 1995.
--- The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan.
Cambridge: University Press, 1985.
Kabeer, Naila. “The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam, and the State in
Bangladesh.” In Deniz Kandiyoti (ed) Women, Islam, and the State. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1991.
Nandy, Ashis. “Woman versus Womanliness in India: An Essay in Social and Political
Psychology.” In Asis Nandy, Ed. At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics
and Culture. Dehli: O.U.P., 1980.

Nawaz, Shuja. Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within. Oxford:
University Press, 2008.
Pirzada, Syed Sharifuddin. Foundations of Pakistan: All-India Muslim League
Documents: 1906-1947. Karach: National Publishing House, 1970.
Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and
Identity. New York: Picador, 2005.

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