Duke University Press Twentieth Century Literature

Apocalyptic Narratives: The Nation in Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"
Author(s): Teresa Heffernan

Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 46, No. 4, Literature and Apocalypse (Winter,
2000), pp. 470-491
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/827843
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Apocalyptic Narratives:
The Nation in Salman Rushdie's
Midnight's Children
TERESA HEFFERNAN
The radically performative laying down of the law by the legislator

must create the very context according to which that law could be
judged to be just: the founding moment, the pre-, is always already
inhabited by the post-.
-Geoffrey Bennington (132)
Thus the veil had to fall so that with it the strongholds of reactionar-
ies preventing women from being educated and participating in pub-
lic life would fall.
-Amina Said (360)
n the Book of Revelation, John is living in forced exile on the island of

Patmos.1 Opposed to and alienated from the existing social and political
order, he predicts the overthrow of a corrupt world and the everlasting reign
of the New Jerusalem. In this revolutionary prophesy, John imagines him-
self as the consciousness of the collective; the boundary between the world
and the word, between narrative and history, must dissolve, and all mar-
gins, including the one he inhabits, must be eradicated to complete this
dream of a perfectly integrated community at the end of history.2
While the belief in the actual or imminent end of the world has re-
ceded, Frank Kermode argues that "the paradigms of apocalypse continue
to lie under our ways of making sense of the world" (28). With the shift
from God's plan for humanity to secular dreams about the world, nationa
ist narratives that both replace and echo Revelation are one of the ways w
470
RUSHDIE'S MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN
order that world. Apocalypse continues to be understood in a secul

text as a revelation or unveiling (from the ancient Greek apokalups
this paradigm underlies the nineteenth-century teleological narr
modern nationalism, where the emergence of the nation is unders
the point of arrival for an "imagined community" (Anderson 6). As Ben
Anderson has suggested, as traditional religious belief wanes, nation
ratives come to satisfy the desire for origins, continuity, and eternity
Like the biblical story, secular apocalyptic writings about the nation
express the dreams of the ostracized and the oppressed about the
or rebirth of a community; the call from beyond (the interference fro
Other) that characterizes apocalyptic writing challenges the establis
der, confuses accepted rules, and ignores the prevalent codes of rea
Jacques Derrida writes, "By its very tone, the mixing of voices, genres
codes, and the breakdown [le detraquement] of destinations, apocalyptic
course can also dismantle the dominant contract or concordat" ("
Apocalyptic Tone" 89). It is not surprising then that the Romantic
and Blake in particular, conceived of the French and American Rev
in millennial terms; the violence and upheaval of these events see
mark the dawn of a new earthly order, freeing man from the tyr
monarchy and church.3 And in Writing the Apocalypse, Lois Parkinson
reads both the Hebrew (Ezekiel, Daniel, Zechariah) and Christian (
13, Matthew 24, 2 Peter, and Revelation) apocalyptic texts, with th
phasis on the merging of private and public destinies, as inspiring the
munal" or national fictions of Latin American writers such as Carlos Fu
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, andJulio Cortazar.
However, the events of the twentieth century have also cast do
apocalyptic nationalist narratives. In E. M. Forster's A Passage to Ind
clearly joins the revolutionary chorus when he declares that "India
a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh
shall be one!" (289). But while Forster suggests that the colonial p
in India is intolerable, completing his novel in the aftermath of th
World War, he is clearly not convinced by the revolutionary promises
tionalism: Fielding taunts Aziz with the remark "India a nation! W
apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth-century sisterhood
And as a Muslim, Aziz himself is only half taken with the idea of t
ern nation as he recognizes the pressures of teleology and origins
company this model. When he is asked to imagine a lineage for th
ern nation, he suggests Afghans as a viable trajectory without being
"quite fit" (289) them in the Hindu Native State of Mau. He also e
ences, at a microcosmic level, the limits of this model, which privilege
when he has to refuse Mrs. Moore's invitation to join her in the
471
TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE
club: "Indians are not allowed into the Chandrapore Club even as gu
(41). Significantly, he is later able to extend an invitation to Adela and M
Moore to "be Moslems together" on the train because membership in
Islamic nation-the umma-is not restricted by birth (130).
In Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Saleem Sinai also draws on th
revolutionary legacy of apocalyptic nationalism as an obvious frame f
account of India's struggle of liberation: "I shall have to write the future
have written the past, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prop
(462). Readings of Midnight's Children either insist on Rushdie's alleg
to nationalism-Josna Rege, for example, suggests that "[d]espite its
ceptual freshness and vitality, Midnight's Children remains very emotion
committed to the narrative of the nation" (366) and that the novel "r
ticizes the Congress Party ideal of 'unity in diversity"' (360)-or, alt
tively, insist that Rushdie is disillusioned not with the nation per se but
the corruption of the postcolonial nation, because those who came to
it were, as Timothy Brennan puts it, "sell-outs and power brokers" (27). H
ever, in this paper, I want to argue that Midnight's Children, in recastin
and drawing on Forster's skepticism, is from the outset suspicious o
very model-with its apocalyptic underpinnings-of the modern nati
Discontented with the narrative of origins and ends implicit in this m
the novel explores an alternative, though equally apocalyptic, conce
the nation, the Islamic umma. However, this paper concludes, securing th
models is the figure of the (un)veiled woman, who tacitly calls into
tion the very apocalyptic language of "unveiling" on which they both res
Like Revelation, the narrative of the modern nation envisions the era
cation of margins and the closing of gaps in the formation of a commun
that emerges at the end of history; cutting across class, race, languag
gender boundaries, a national boundary circumscribes differences. Sa
as the chronicler of the nation, insists on the idea of community as a "m
ing of voices" in a contained space. He writes: "To understand just on
you have to swallow the world" (109). Frederic Jameson argues that
precisely this sense of community that distinguishes Third World literat
from the private, individualistic, fragmented, and alienated narrativ
America. The novel, a child of Western capitalism, he contests, is bor
of the radical split between private and public; however, in the Third Wo
the novel resolves this division necessarily by taking the form of "na
allegories," "where the telling of the individual story and the individual
perience cannot but ultimately involve the whole labourious telling o
experience of the collectivity itself' (85). Saleem, however, suggests that
process of "telling the experience of the collectivity" is quite a bit more
plicated than Jameson suggests.4 Even as Saleem invokes the metaph
472
swallowing as inclusion, he encounters the problems of contai

boundaries, centrality, and marginality, problems that plague mod
tions and apocalyptic visions. Who is inside, who is outside, and
fines this "imagined community"?
National boundaries are legitimated through the invocation of
in the form of continuous and sacred historical narratives. Nationa
Jawahar Lal Nehru writes to Saleem in Midnight's Children, is mer
newest bearer of that ancient face of India" (122). Although India
tion is both a modern and an imported concept, Nehru, in an artic
ten long before he was leader of India, entitled "The Psychology of
Nationalism," insists (in an attempt to counter British imperialism) tha
dia" has always shared a common and continuous history: "even in
mote past there has always been a fundamental unity to India-a un
common faith and culture. India was Bharata, the holy land of the
(219).
As an Indian nationalist, Nehru invokes a "spiritual" India as d
from the rational secular state, both to distinguish the new nation fro
colonial heritage and to suggest that liberation from colonial rule i
a return to a national identity that has been interrupted by colonialism
his appeal to a historical origin in turn lends legitimacy to the i
majority and reinforces the centrality and sovereignty of the stat
mode's argument that ends (and, subsequently, origins) lend mea
individual life, when transferred to the context of nations, necess
vokes a particular trajectory that conflicts with the rhetoric of comm
and inclusion. Apocalyptic narratives of nations, immersed in tele
arguments, necessarily introduce the problem of majorities and mi
of insiders and outsiders.
The "unity of common faith and culture" and the sense of destiny mas-
querade as tradition but draw directly on the legacy of the modern myth of
the nation. Nehru's invocation of India as destiny recalls, according to
Anderson, one of the defining features of the modern nation. While na-
tions are born in Europe at the dusk of the religious age, they are more
than a rational construct. The mythic dimension of the nation provides a
sense of continuity, destiny, and meaning that fills the void left by religion.
Hence, while
nation-states are widely conceded to be "new" and "historical," the

nations to which they give political expression always loom out of
an immemorial past. ... It is the magic of nationalism to turn
chance into destiny. (19)
473
As Saleem tries to invoke the abstractions of destiny and purpose

Prime Minister wrote me a letter" (119)-at the Midnight Children's
ference, his alter ego Shiva interjects with the other side of the mo
nation-material well-being, self-interest, the particular and the continge
What purpose, man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping w

got reason, yara? For what reason you're rich and I'm poor? Wh
the reason in starving, man? God knows how many millions
damn fools living in this country, man, and you think there's a pu
pose! Man, I'll tell you-you got to get what you can, do what
can with it, and then you got to die. (220)
The irony of course is that they have been switched at birth, proving Sh
point that what Saleem is reading as destiny is really a question of ch
Saleem finally has to shut Shiva out of the conference, but he cannot
the issues Shiva has raised about who defines the destiny of the natio
whose interests these narratives of endings and origins serve.6
Saleem confronts the underlying problem of the particular posin
the universal in the invocation of destiny as he seeks to legitimize his ta
the nation. While he insists that "I had been mysteriously handcuff
history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country"
soon as he begins his history of the new nation, other histories inte
The rivalry to control the center is fierce, and Saleem finds himself com
ing with politicians ("Indira is India") and rich gurus, such as Lord K
Khusrovand, formerly known as Cyrus, a childhood playmate of Sal
"[W]hen set beside Cyrus's India," complains Saleem, "my own vers
seems almost mundane" (269). Saleem tries, without much success, to
gotiate the tensions that arise from Shiva's comments-public versu
vate, community versus the individual, centrality versus marginality, re
sentation versus obscurity-tensions that plague the modern nation.
Like the exiles in apocalyptic texts, in order to realize "meaning
continuity and escape "absurdity" or contingency (9), Saleem must be
the consciousness of this new "nation that had never previously exis
(112); Saleem must be India (420). The pressures of "unity" lead Salee
believe that he is in control of the world, that there is nothing beyo
knowledge and that there is no boundary he cannot cross. But, in re
spect, he realizes that this belief is defensive, "an instinct for self-prese
tion" (175) employed to protect himself against the flooding multi
who threaten to annihilate him with their own unique visions. In thi
temporary world, "truth" has nothing to do with the fierce competition
differing narratives of the nation. But, perhaps, Saleem suggests, as
flects on some of the "lost" prophets of Arabia (Maslama, Hanza
474
Safwan, and Saleem's namesake, Khalid ibn Sinan), it never has: "Pr
are not always false simply because they are overtaken, and swallo
by history" (305).
Saddled with the task of accommodating diversity within the boun
a unified narrative of the nation and motivated by his own imminent
lution, Saleem battles to narrate an official version of history but is p
by some of the problems inherent in the task: how can he both cl
represent the teeming multitudes he has ingested and acknowled
other voices have been excluded, "swallowed up, by history"? In other
how tenable is India's nationalist slogan "unity in diversity" that Saleem
so desperately to adhere to in his narrative of independence? As com
as Saleem is to writing a chronological history of India, the crush
conflicting stories, which must be ignored in order for Saleem's n
to secure its origin and reach its end, force Saleem to ask, "if I began
would I, too, end in a different place?" (427). Saleem, like India, be
crack under the pressure of "unifying" the multitudes:
But how can I, look at me, I'm tearing myself apart, can't e
agree with myself, talking arguing like a wild fellow, crackin
memory going, yes, memory plunging into chasms and being
lowed by the dark, only fragments remain, none of it make
any more!-But I mustn't presume to judge; must simply con
(having once begun) until the end. (421)
The problem Saleem is having with the chronological ordering
narrative, of having no time for digressions (other stories) becaus
pressure of telling the central story-which introduces the whole
of origins and endings and centers and margins in the documentin
history of the nation-is imported, like the novel genre itself, from an
time and place. In Laurence Sterne's eighteenth-century novel Tr
Shandy, which foregrounds the implicit tensions in the Enlighte
project, the narrator faces the dilemma inherited by Saleem: "For, if h
author] begins a digression,-from that moment, I observe, his who
stands stock-still;-and if he goes on with his main work,-then the
end to the digression" (73). Sterne's work offers a critique of th
emerging genre of the novel and the very idea on which the novel
the interior private and autonomous bourgeois self, a construction
that introduces, as Karl Marx claims in "On the Jewish Question"
this paper will return to), the split between the private and public self
is at the crux of the modern nation and its citizen/state divide.
Since Saleem is stuck in this divide and tries to reconcile the sense of
national community with his particular life through a coherent narrative
475
his private self that will mirror perfectly that of his community (hence his
absurd attempts to connect his personal life with the more widely publi-
cized "official" version of India), perhaps we should turn to the likely origin
of this divide. It is after all "Mountbatten's ticktock ... English-made" (106)
that has fathered the children of midnight, "the children of the time: fathered,
you understand, by history" (118). We cannot fully understand Saleem's
problem from the vantage point of a country where "'yesterday' is the same
as their word for 'tomorrow"' (106). To understand the idea of a nation's
history as progress (as measured by a British clock), which has catapulted
Saleem into the narrative dilemmas posed by the oppositions progress/di-
gression, center/margin, private/public, we have to go elsewhere, to an-
other prophesy on the end of history.
THE LAST MAN AND THE END OF HISTORY
ukuyama's narrative (via Alexandre Kojeve's reading of Hegel) of

fully evolved-"the last"-man and the triumph of Western liber
begins with the French revolution and the ideals of liberty and equ
Although there was some work to be done after 1806, he argues-ab
ing slavery and extending rights to women, workers, blacks, and oth
cial minorities-history effectively ended with the Battle of Jena ("
History?" 5). Since then, there have been a few complications (world
communism, fascism, the threat of a nuclear apocalypse brought abo
an "updated marxism" ["End of History" 4]8), but finally, it is safe t
Western liberalism has won. He writes:
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or
the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of
history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evo-
lution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the
final form of human government. ("End of History" 4)
Fukuyama's victory speech, which draws on secular apocalyptic rhetoric in
the name of universal man, makes us ask an important question about rights:
is it merely a question of extending and readjusting the rights of man to
accommodate what has historically been left out, as Fukuyama suggests, or
are the rights of man legitimated in and by bounded narratives? John Stuart
Mill pondered the paradox of rights, with respect to imperialism, in his es-
say "On Liberty": "I as a liberal, democratic, individually autonomous En-
glishman, am in a very invidious position, because I am a democrat at home
and a despot abroad." Homi Bhabha points to this passage in Mill as evi-
dence of the contradictions inherent in the Enlightenment project (27).
476
Toni Morrison has drawn out "the historical connection between the En-
lightenment and the institution of slavery-the rights of man and his en
slavement" (42). Mary Astell asked in 1730 "If all Men are born Free, how is it
that all Women are born Slaves?" (107). And Fatima Mernissi asked of the
American government, after the "othering" of the Arab that legitimated the
Gulf War in 1991, "Can one trumpet universality and erect frontiers at the
same time?" (168). Fukuyama himself uncritically repeats this pattern of a
bounded narrative of rights when he insists on locating the origin of "uni
versal man" in Europe and on exempting some from his definition of man
kind, arguing that "it matters very little what strange thoughts occur t
people in Albania or Burkino Faso, for we are interested in what one could
in some sense call the common ideological heritage of mankind" ("End o
History" 9).
This tension between the impulse to universalize and the establishment
of boundaries stems from the very document, the Declaration of 1798, that
serves as the basis for Fukuyama's essay. AsJean-Francois Lyotard writes, the
members of the Constituent Assembly "hallucinated humanity within the
nation" (The Differend 147). He argues that there is no possibility of recon-
ciling the rights of universal man, which are authorized by a transcendent
Ideal (the Supreme Being), with the rights of man as authorized by the
nation, which relies on the authority of necessarily exclusive names and nar-
ratives of origin. Because these authorizations cannot be reconciled, after
the French Revolution,
it will no longer be known whether the law thereby declared is

French or human, whether the war conducted in the name of rights
is one of conquest or liberation, whether the violence exerted un-
der the title of freedom is repressive or pedagogical (progressive),
whether those nations which are not French ought to become
French or become human by endowing themselves with Constitu-
tions that conform to the Declaration, be they anti-French. (147)
This is the dilemma that haunts modern nationalist movements orga-
nized around resistance. Do nationalist movements, in the "search for a le-
gitimating mode of nomination and origin" (Deane 19), serve as an effec-
tive counter to imperialism, or do nationalist narratives in doing so remain
trapped in the legacy of imperialism? These are some of the questions that
complicate Saleem Sinai's narration of Indian independence. Saleem be-
gins his and India's story, which he insists are bound together, with his grand-
father, who is appropriately named, for a tale of origins, Aadam Aziz. Aadam
has studied medicine in Germany and returns to his village only to find his
"new" knowledge and "modern" ways greeted with both skepticism and con-
477
tempt by the ancient boatman Tai, a historian who scorns the very
progress (21). Disheartened, Aziz departs from Kashmir for Amritsar, w
after witnessing the massacre of peaceful demonstrators protesting
occupation, Aadam becomes an "Indian" (40).
Thus, Saleem begins his tale of the birth of the nation at the m
when the "modern" Aadam becomes conscious that he is "Indian," a
ment that is awakened by the brutality of imperialism. However, this "
ning" is complicated by Saleem's discovery that both his own a
nation's origins also lead him back to Britain. Dipesh Chakrabarty a
that, as subjects of Britain, colonized Indians wanted to become "leg
jects" or "modern individuals" (7). The colonized Indian dreamt of
European. In contrast, Indian nationalists abandoned the desire to b
ropean," and, assuming that the concept of "individual rights" was
sal, wanted to be both Indians and citizens (7). But Saleem's lineag
gests that the idea of individual rights, the basis of the modern na
historically specific. He discovers that not only is his biological fat
Englishman William Methwold (and, to make matters worse, his nos
herited from a French grandmother), but also that Methwold's ancestor
East Indian Company officer, initiated the dream of Bombay, whic
way to the dream of "India" (92). Further, the Indian nationalists suffer
the problem of "turning white" (179), "a disease which leaked into histo
Saleem writes, "and erupted on an enormous scale shortly after Ind
dence" (45).
Further, if the advocates of the social contract write of the part
while all the time legitimating their argument with the myth of the u
sal, so, likewise, do the Indian nationalists in Midnight's Children invok
myth of public communities while all the while ensuring their own pri
interests. Referring to the Indian businessmen, who profited enor
from the first Five Year Plan, the plan to modernize, Saleem writes:
It seems that the gargantuan (even heroic) efforts involved in

ing over from the British and becoming masters of their own de
nies had drained the colour of their cheeks ... The businessmen
of India were turning white. (179)
This scenario repeats itself in the examples of the Pakistani nationalists. The
Muslim League, "[l]andowners with invested interests to protect" (46), a
tates for the partition of India, all the while claiming to represent all Mus-
lims but serving no one's interests but their own.
As Marx argues in his essay "On the Jewish Question," the private a
public are never really reconciled in the modern nation, and versions
nationalism derived from the social contract inevitably end up securing pri-
478
vate interests. The state is not the voice of the public but the prot
the private:
It is difficult enough to understand that a nation which has j

gun to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between diffe
sections of the people and to establish a political commu
should solemnly proclaim [in the Declaration of 1791] the rig
the egoistic man.... The matter becomes still more incompre
sible when we observe that the political liberators reduce ci
ship, the political community, to a mere means for preserving the
called rights of man. (43)
Thus, Saleem, in his attempt to narrate the birth of an indep
nation, finds at least one road persistently and unwittingly forcing hi
to Britain. As Gayatri Spivak has argued, unlike America and the
the Founding Fathers, where British merchants are able to secure a
for their nation in a sparsely populated land, "[i]n the case of India
and empire step forth as place-holders for a 'failed originary mo
("Scattered Speculations" 264). Although nationalism was instigated
name of the masses9 and, it is argued, "Indians had for years dem
constitution establishing parliamentary democracy" (Austin xiii) t
their liberty from British rule, this demand was not only predicted an
empted but also celebrated as a British triumph by Thomas Macaul
retary to the Board of Control, in 1833. In a speech he made to the
House of Commons, he said of the Indian public:
that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they
in some future age demand European institutions.... Whenev
[such a day] comes it will be the proudest day in English hi
(qtd. in Appadorai xxvii)
APOCALYPTIC NARRATIVE II: THE UMMA
iven Fukuyama's reading of history, how is the violence th

postindependence India apart today to be explained now th
has adopted the European constitutional model based on the idea
erty and equality? Is it that India has failed to meet the demands of "
nity"? Has the country failed to evolve? Or has the very apocalyptic r
of "arrival" contributed to the exclusion of large populations from
stitutional "we, the people of India"?
As Saleem is born, a "wiry" man in Delhi (Nehru) announces t
moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step
the old to the new" (116). Caught in an evolutionary version of histor
479
has largely been manufactured in Europe, and having adopted a Eur

constitutional model, India continues to be assessed in terms of this mod
The arrival of India, the nation state, signals the end of all history and
ideological evolution, while any violence or opposition (Fukuyama
that this is true of most of the Third World) "remains very much mire
history" (Fukuyama, "End of History" 15). In keeping with the apoc
understanding of the emergence of the nation as the end of hi
Gyanendra Pandey writes that the history of India as it is taught in sch
and universities ends in 1947, while what is often referred to as commu
ism, but, in fact, is any voice of protest (women, tribal peoples, the poo
persistently read as an "aberration." Violence occurs outside the para
of the harmonious "we" and is marked as antinational. The "we" rep
official history, the "state-centred drive to homogenize and 'norm
(29).
Some suggest that political violence occurs in a zone where diffe
and conflicting versions of nationalism meet. For instance, Partha Chatt
argues in The Nation and Its Fragments that while this violence is often
ferred to as "bad nationalism" (4), a perversion (along with drugs an
rorism) that has infected the Third World, the violence, in fact, is indi
of the inherent conflict between capital and community. The antic
movements marked a division between the inner, spiritual world of nat
culture (for example, the resistance organized by figures like Gandh
the outer material domain that adheres to the colonial model. Havin
jected civil society (individualistic and capitalistic), the postcolonial
adheres to a sense of community that invokes the rhetoric of love and k
ship that must in turn be suppressed by the state governments that
accommodate the modern world and its narrative of capital.
India is not of course a blank slate upon which only the British
inscribed a destiny. India's long and complicated history has other s
that conflict with the European nationalist model, and Saleem, fathe
many, invokes another prophetic current. Tai, the boatman, invokes a s
of community that is founded not on individualistic and private his
narratives of progress but on a sense of humanity as universal, ahist
and timeless, a model he seems to embody: "Nobody could remember
Tai had been young. He had been plying this same boat, standing
same hunched position, across the Dal and Nageen Lakes... forever"
Vehemently opposed to the idea of progress, Tai is "the living antithesis
Aadam's German friends' belief "in the inevitability of change" (1
stories he tells the young Aadam are not of national boundaries and
narratives but of the Mughal Emperors, such asJehangir, the "Encom
of the Earth."
480
Tai articulates the Muslim sense of community and nation, the

which, like the Christian and Hebraic traditions, has been read as
tionary. In the Koran, the stories of Hud and the Tribe of Ad, Salih an
destruction of Thamud, and Shu'aib and the destruction of Midian estab-
lish a similar pattern of destruction and renewal as prophesied by the exile
and intimate the LastJudgment." However, unlike the biblical stories, which
are inscribed in a teleological framework (Genesis to Revelation), this group
of stories invokes a spatial totality-"the whole in every part," the infinite in
every moment.
Even as Islam claims Mohammed as the last in a long line of Christian
and Hebrew prophets (from Abraham to Jesus), it is troubled by this teleo-
logical narrative. Ahmed Sinai (Saleem's father and one of the business-
men who suffers from the disease of turning white) wants to figure out the
proper order of the Koran; the implied "disorder" marks the resistance of
this sacred book to linear or chronological forms (82). The transhis-torical,
antinarrative, antiprogress apocalypse of the Koranic tales has inspired, like
the apocalyptic biblical tales, hopes of the rebirth or renewal of a commu-
nity. According to Islam, Mohammed was sent to end the violence and cor-
ruption that reigned among the Arabs of the jahiliyya (the pre-Islamic era)
and ensure peace. Norman 0. Brown argues that it is precisely the metahis-
torical structure of the Koran that breaks or 'junks" Christian and Hebraic
traditions, reduces them to rubble, and introduces a "new civilization" that
works "to change the imagination of the masses, the folk who shape and
are shaped by folklore and folktales" (169). This new civilization, the umma
(the Islamic nation), is secured by the shari'a. Unlike the Declaration of
Rights that serves to protect individual freedoms, the shari'a, as a legislative
body, serves to unite the community and thus discounts the particulars of
location or historical circumstance. It "is seen as static and immutable, free
from the currents of time, applicable to all societies that accept Islam as
religion" (Amin 223).12
It is this spirit of community that kindles Aadam's optimism about the
Hummingbird, a magician who rises from the ghetto in Delhi and is the
"moving spirit" of the Free Islam Convocation that stands on the motto,
borrowed from the poet Iqbal: "Where can we find a land that is foreign to
God?" (47). This informal organization promotes the idea of a universal
community that does not pander to private interests or bounded narratives,
an idea that finds renewed expression in another ghetto magician, Picture
Singh, who is "no lover of democracy" (400). However, this "universal" com-
munity unquestionably privileges masculinity, as we see in Hummingbird's
ability to attract "members" by inducing erections with his voice ("Padma
laughs, 'no wonder he was so popular with the men!"' [46]) and by Picture
481
Singh's (the "patriarch of the ghetto") fight for supremacy in the Met
Club, where blind women, with painted eyes, live in "a world without fa
or names" in "that place outside time, that negation of history" (454).
Saleem also offers a more cynical account of the surrender of the ind
vidual to the community, at least as an official policy. From its creation, Pa
kistan has attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to reconcile the logic of t
rights of the private liberal citizen with its commitment to Islam, the popu
lar ideological basis of the nation, because "in Muslim theory, church a
state are not separate or separable institutions" (Lewis 28). After suffering a
blow from a spittoon in the "Land of the Pure" (Pakistan), Saleem forsak
his private narrative, forgets his mothers, fathers, and midnight origins an
abandoning his "lust-for-centrality" (356), achieves purity. Saleem's new
adopted "philosophy of acceptance" in the army life, which requires t
abandonment of self-interest in the service of the "greater good" of the na-
tion, however, leads him to commit horrible acts in the name of a fraterna
community. Working as a bloodhound, he ruthlessly tracks down enem
of national unity. In his other role as buddha, "abstracted," "emptied of his-
tory," "anaesthetized against feelings as well as memories," Saleem deni
his in-the-world, material being (350).
The metaphor of swallowing the world that Saleem repeatedly invok
in his attempt to narrate the nation exposes the weakness of both the h
torical and ahistorical models: the rhetoric of democracy and individu
rights inevitably leads him to the problem of the particular posing as t
universal, while the rhetoric of community, the pressures of having to tran
scend place and time, literally leaves him abstracted and disembodied.
THE POSTAPOCALYPSE AND THE UNVEILING OF A NATION
oth the umma and the modern nation are secured by the figure o
(un)veiled woman, who, in her very exclusion, is critical to these
els. Padma, to whom Saleem tells his tale, remains on the periphe
Saleem's story of nations. Her comments and suggestions are avai
the reader but are never incorporated into Saleem's narrative. The f
there is no sexual union further suggests the asymmetry of their r
ship. Yet, although this is clearly a hierarchical relationship, Saleem
entirely and utterly dependent on her: she sits at his feet and hold
together; when she leaves, his cracks widen and he cannot write (
Padma's peripheral status reflects the position of women in natio
struggles, where they are at once absolutely crucial and yet silent, espe
on matters of gender. Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas, founder and mem
the international organization "Women Living under Muslim Law," q
482
ing what she refers to as her earlier blindly nationalistic stance in

writes: "Defending women's rights 'now' (this 'now' being ANY h
moment) is always a betrayal-of the people, of the nation, of the
tion, of Islam, of national identity, of cultural roots, of the Third
(13). Referring to nationalist struggles in the Third World in gene
to India in particular, KumariJayawardena writes:
while Indian women were to participate in all stages of the

ment for national independence, they did so in a way that w
ceptable to, and was dictated by, the male leaders and which
formed to the prevalent ideology on the position of women
Ketu Katrak further argues that, although Gandhi mobilized wome
nationalist struggle, his coding of passive resistance in accordance w
traditional ideology of the feminine (self-sacrifice and purity) and his
rizing of the role of women as wife and mother ensured the continued
nessing of female sexuality to serve a patriarchal order.
The brotherhood of the umma finds expression in Midnight's Child
as already noted, in the struggles of the patriarch Picture Singh in
of blind women and in the Hummingbird's commanding voice th
male "members" to attention. In its official form, in Pakistan, the bro
hood takes on a more insidious hue, dependent as it is on the abs
the female. The Brass Monkey starts out as a reckless, disrespectf
outraged by gender inequity, particularly by her brother's favored po
in the household (152). But in her reincarnation she becomesJamila
"Pakistan's Angel," the "Nation's Voice," submissive and pure. Pre
Ayud tells her, "your voice will be a sword for purity; it will be a weapo
which we shall cleanse men's souls" (315). Jamila Singer, hidden a
hind her "famous, all-concealing, white silk chadar," secures the b
hood and serves the state by her invisibility. The umma or nation
solidarity only when sexual difference is hidden away behind a veil
Mernissi, a Koranic scholar, writes: women's "invisibility made it possi
forget difference and create the fiction that the umma was unified be
it was homogenous" (127). The blank sheet or veil, pure and whit
stands in place ofJamila's body reflects back the unity of the nation.
The sheet held up by the female wrestlers behind which Jamila
sits brings us to another tale of women and the nation, this time of th
ern nation, which provokes us to ask whether women's liberation is
a question of tearing away the Islamic veil. Aadam "emancipates" hi
Naseem, from behind her sheet, slowly cutting her way to freedom. B
eration" of course has a complicated history in the context of pos
nations. Many have argued that the colonial fixation with "white m
483
TWENT IEJ H CENTURYLITERATURE
ing brown women from brown men" (Spivak, "Subaltern" 242), an attitud
that Aadam has internalized (" [s] tart thinking about being a moder India
woman" [emphasis mine, 34]) in his partial enthusiasm for the West, repro
duces the "civilizing the savages" argument from which colonialism drew its
raison d'etre.13 When Aadam tries to insist that his wife abandon purdah
she protests, not on behalf of modesty (the unveiling of her face and feet
but because "they will see my deepest shame!" Aadam is not really inter-
ested in the wishes of his wife. His act of liberation is also an act of violation
as he "drags all his wife's purdah-veils from her suitcase ... and sets fire to
them" (34). Naseem's "deepest shame" is thus the double violation, by colo-
nialism and patriarchy, that leaves her literally without a place, "for all her
presence and bulk... adrift in the universe" (41).
Aadam, half enamored with Western narratives of citizenship, liberates
Naseem only to insist that she be "modern" and submit to the sexual/social
contract that guarantees the European model of nationalism: "move a little,
I mean, like a woman" (34), Aadam demands of his newly "liberated" bride.
In this model, women are also "veiled" or cut off from the public sphere, as
the social contract of modern nations is also, as Carole Pateman argues, a
"sexual contract" that divides and genders public and private spaces. The
public sphere of "individuals," who make the pact guaranteeing rights,
equality, and freedom, belongs to men, who also rule in the private sphere
of blood ties and passion, the world of women. Thus Aadam, actively in-
volved in the liberation struggle against the paternal colonial order, is still
free to command his wife to perform sexually. Pateman writes that the so-
cial contract is fraternal to the extent that it guarantees men's rights over
women:
Civil individuals have a fraternal bond because, as men, th

common interest in upholding the contract which legitim
masculine patriarchal right and allows them to gain ma
psychological benefit from women's subjection. ("Frater
Aadam is outraged when he discovers that this contract tha
ates the womb in the service of the teleology of the modern natio
violated. On discovering that his daughter (living happily with
loves) is still a virgin, he promptly ends this threatening relat
transfers his daughter to another man. "'Can you imagine how
of his nose must have felt?"' (60) queries the narrator on the
his married daughter's virgin state, a nose that has "'dynasties
side it'" (14). In her second marriage, Amina is exchanged bet
men, Aadam and Ahmed Sinai, completing the social/sexual con
484
anteeing the right of men to claim women as their property and e

the continuity of the paternal lineage:
And now Aadam Aziz lifted his daughter (with his own arms)
ing her up after the dowry into the care of this man who h
named and so re-invented her, thus becoming in a sense her
as well as her new husband. (66)
Like her mother, Amina is forced, in the modern nation, to surrender to
the fraternal order.
Why is it impossible to accommodate women in either the modern na-

tion or umma ? Charu Verma, arguing that Midnight's Children is a thoroughly
sexist novel, asks, with respect to Padma, "[w]here is her story?" (160). Yet,
Padma's exclusion is not an oversight. Padma's role as the outsider is the
constant reminder of the impossibility of women's inclusion in either of
Saleem's tales of the nation. Saleem confesses that "the feeling had come
upon me that I was somehow creating a world" (174). However, Padma's
persistent sexual overtures and Saleem's sexual impotency underlie the
irony of his desire to "give birth" to the nation and suggest the reason why
women are "never central" and could never be central to his story (192).
Pateman argues that the social contract theorists' appropriation of a capac-
ity unique to women, giving birth, in turn means that women must be de-
nied access to the public realm, "bodily removed from civil society" (45).
She writes:
The social contract is the point of origin, or birth, of civil society,

and simultaneously its separation from the (private) sphere of real
birth and the disorder of women. The brothers give birth to an arti-
ficial body, the body politic of civil society; they create Hobbes's "Ar-
tificial Man, we call a Commonwealth," or Rousseau's "artificial and
collective body," or the "one Body" of Locke's "Body Politick."
("Fraternal" 115).14
The narrative of origins that occurs in the public sphere and that lends a
foundation to the modern nation, outside the "disorder of women," gives
rise to the illusion that legislation can articulate and rationalize humanity.
Simply suppressing narratives of historical origin in order to guarantee
a sense of community that transcends necessarily bounded and thus private
interests, however, does not lead us out of the dilemma of the patriarchal
construction of nation. As Mernissi has argued, the homogeneity of the
umma is an abstraction that is threatened when you introduce sexual differ-
ence and the womb, which gives birth to the material, the particular, and
the mortal. She writes:
485
Because the child of the womb of the woman is mortal ... the law
of paternity was instituted to screen off the uterus and woman's wi
within the sexual domain. Islam offered the Arabs two gifts, t
idea of paternity and the Muslim calendar-gifts that are the tw
faces of the same thing, the privilege of eternity. The new code
immortality was to be inscribed on the body of woman. (128)
In light of Fukuyama's apocalyptic pronouncement on the end of h
tory, the question-what happens next?-that Padma, the illiterate fact
worker, persistently asks is perhaps not as "naive" as some critics have
gued.'5 Even as Saleem as prophet announces the end of history with t
arrival of India, Padma continues to ask what comes after the end, rem
ing Saleem of his mortality and hence of the limits and boundaries of
rative: "'You better get a move on or you'll die before you get yourself bor
(38). Further, countering the abstracted notions of community, she h
things together for Saleem; she reminds him of the body and prevents him
from literally splitting apart.
It is Padma's voice that makes us aware that there are limits to knowl-
edge, which prevent entirely inclusive narratives of the nation. It makes us

aware of what's at stake when political identities are secured in narratives of
origins or by abstractions that necessarily seclude or disavow women's bod
ies. Padma forces back upon Saleem's versions of the nation the recogni
tion of sexual difference, of identities that are "born" only in and of thi
difference. The right of the nation is not to claim histories and names bu
to claim histories and names as contested and liminal spaces-unclaimed
by origins, marked by death.
The postapocalyptic nation would thus involve the "unveiling" of
women not as an act of liberation but as the revelation of identity as differ-
ence. This unveiling would, paradoxically, thwart the very apocalyptic rheto-
ric that underlies the idea of the modern nation and the Islamic nation, the
umma. Saleem contemplates the meaning of his own name, and he con-
cludes that "when all that is said and done; when Ibn Sina is forgotten an
the moon has set; when snakes lie hidden and revelations end, it is the name
of the desert-of barrenness, infertility, dust; the name of the end" (304
The name disappears into the desert-the "name of the end," the name o
nothing. The body is thus bereft of inscription. Neither historical founda
tions nor transcendent abstractions can lend it ultimate legitimacy; the sur-
plus of the body is always already the post (not the end, but the nascent
state16) of the apocalyptic nation.
486
NOTES
1 There are some who disagree about this interpretation of R

Leonard Thompson argues, for instance, that the wording "on th
Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus" is a
and that John may have chosen to live on the island. However, it is
agreed thatJohn suffered some degree of persecution and was living
2 Walter Schmithals, in his study of apocalyptic literature, argues
apocalyptic "comprehends reality as history" understood as a "unitar
moving toward a goal" (33).
3 However, for instance, Steven Goldsmith argues that Blake inv
apocalypse as change, but, simultaneously, in his cryptic codes, layer
and dedication to revision, resists the idea of apocalypse. He writes o
"his apocalyptic imagery collides with one of his most characteristic p
textual strategies-the subversion of apocalypse through representati
4 Saleem is not alone in his view. Aijaz Ahmad, among others, has
Jameson and accused him of a reductive "othering" of Third World l
5 Hindu fundamentalism is an obvious repercussion of the introd
the democratic tenet of "majority rule." See, for instance, the propag
phlet "Hindu Brothers Consider and Be Warned," circulated in Bhaga
reprinted and translated by Gyanendra Pandey in his article. After
alarm the increase of the Muslim population, the pamphlet conclude
sacrifice your wealth, your body, your all for the protection of the H
and nation and for the declaration of this country as a Hindu nation
James Harrison compares Saleem's "vague do-goodism" to Shiv
less self-interest" (43). While Saleem can afford to be liberal, Shiva fo
to confront the problem of self-interest.
7 See Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. The quota
taken from an earlier article entitled "The End of History?" (1989), i
he argued that man has reached the end of history with the spread of
form of government, liberal democracy. In his book, Fukuyama expan
idea of liberal democracy as ideal by reviewing both the economic be
the "struggle for recognition" (xx) of human dignity that, he argue
pany this system of government.
8 Ironically, this threat of a nuclear apocalypse is announced by a m
in an interview with James Atlas, said that he had abandoned the "n
Derrida and Roland Barthes for the "real world" of nuclear weapons
9 Derrida has also noted the complicated matter of the signature
"good people" on the Declaration of Independence, who declare thems
and independent. At what point are the people freed? Do they sign a
dividuals or are they emancipated by the contract in the act of signin
the "people" are invented by the Declaration, where representativ
behalf of the people, then the invocation of "the people" is forever co
by the fact that the "signature invents the signer" ("Declarations of
dence" 10).
10 See, in particular, Chatterjee's earlier work on nationalism and colonial-
ism, Nationalist Thought. After an exhaustive examination of various nationalist
models, he details the attributes of Gandhi's model for the postcolonial world.
487
1 Koran 41:1 and 42:53. These tales are grouped together in the s
Revelations Well Expounded. Each tells of a messenger from God who ar
with warnings and prophesies but is ignored by the people. The people i
suffer as a result of their arrogant dismissal of the messenger.
12 For a more detailed analysis of the modern vs. the Islamic state see
Zubaida. He describes the ideal of Islam as the "unity of state and the co
nity of the faithful" (41). However, Zubaida goes on to argue that actual I
states have fallen short of this ideal.
13 See Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?". Leila Ahmed argues that t
veiled woman, the most visible mark of difference between Islam and the West,
was read by colonialists as proof of the orientals' inferiority. Lord Cromer, who
shared this view and championed the "liberation," the unveiling, of Egyptian
women, at the same time discouraged the practice of medicine in Egypt by
women and actively opposed the women's suffrage movement in England. Ahmed
concludes:
Feminism on the home front and feminism directed against white

was to be resisted and suppressed; but taken abroad and directed aga
the cultures of colonized peoples, it could be promoted in ways that
mirably served and furthered the project of the dominance of white m
(153)
See also Ella Shohat's work on cinema and the veiling and unveiling of wo
in Hollywood films, which, she argues, perpetuates the colonial myth of lib
tion. Her analysis of orientalist films leads her to conclude that the role of
Arab woman in Hollywood is one in which she is first saved from her op
sive and backward culture and its villainous men and then claimed as the vic-
tory prize by the Western hero. Malek Alloula's work, The Colonial Harem, a st
of postcards of Algerian women produced by French photographers, also wor
through an interesting analysis of the colonialist interest in unveiling the ve
woman.
14 In The Sexual Contract, Pateman points to the problem of "o

source of legitimacy for a society. Citing the case of Australia, sh
radically different "founding" moments of the nation: five days
colonist convicts arrived in 1788, the female colonist convicts were released
ashore into the possession of and for the pleasure of the men. Which narra-
tive, Pateman asks us to consider, reveals the historical origin of the nation? She
concludes: "Political argument must leave behind stories of origins and origi-
nal contracts and move from the terrain of contract and the individual as owner"
(232).
15 See for instance Keith Wilson's article on reader responsibility in Midnight's
Children, in which he contrasts the naive reading of Padma with the more so-
phisticated reading that Saleem's work demands (34). Given Padma's status in
the novel as an illiterate factory worker in a postcolonial nation and given the
role education played in colonialism, her comments surely do more than sup-
port a hierarchy of reading based on the ability to pick up on references to British
literature.
16 Here I borrow from Lyotard's sense of "post" from his work on The Po
modern Condition (79). Also see Geoffrey Bennington's "Postal Politics and
Institution of the Nation"; "post" in the context of his piece is antiapocalyp
488
in that it refers to putting into circulation (into a circuit that is ope

thing that necessarily has no definitive point of departure or arrival.
Thanks to Jill Didur, Linda Hutcheon, and David Vainola for reading,
ing, and commenting on drafts of this paper. Thanks also to the Sain
Senate Research Committee for funding some of this research.
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Apocalyptic Narratives: The Nation in Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"

Author(s): Teresa Heffernan

The radically performative laying down of the law by the legislator

-Amina Said (360)

n the Book of Revelation, John is living in forced exile on the island of

order that world. Apocalypse continues to be understood in a secul

swallowing as inclusion, he encounters the problems of contai

nation-states are widely conceded to be "new" and "historical," the

As Saleem tries to invoke the abstractions of destiny and purpose

What purpose, man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping w

national community with his particular life through a coherent narrative

THE LAST MAN AND THE END OF HISTORY

ukuyama's narrative (via Alexandre Kojeve's reading of Hegel) of

it will no longer be known whether the law thereby declared is

It seems that the gargantuan (even heroic) efforts involved in

It is difficult enough to understand that a nation which has j

APOCALYPTIC NARRATIVE II: THE UMMA

iven Fukuyama's reading of history, how is the violence th

has largely been manufactured in Europe, and having adopted a Eur

Tai articulates the Muslim sense of community and nation, the

THE POSTAPOCALYPSE AND THE UNVEILING OF A NATION

ing what she refers to as her earlier blindly nationalistic stance in

while Indian women were to participate in all stages of the

Civil individuals have a fraternal bond because, as men, th

anteeing the right of men to claim women as their property and e

Why is it impossible to accommodate women in either the modern na-

The social contract is the point of origin, or birth, of civil society,

edge, which prevent entirely inclusive narratives of the nation. It makes us

1 There are some who disagree about this interpretation of R

Feminism on the home front and feminism directed against white

14 In The Sexual Contract, Pateman points to the problem of "o

in that it refers to putting into circulation (into a circuit that is ope

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso,

. "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy." Trans. Joh

Schmithals, Walter. The Apocalyptic Movement: Introduction and Interpret

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