Best services for writing your paper according to Trustpilot
Examine the construction of identity in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.
Colonialism is the consolidation of imperial power through the attempt to
govern lands that are now occupied. Postcolonial literature sets out to oppose the
colonialist perspective. They develop a perspective that retrieves states of marginality
and is concerned with man's quest for his identity. Postcolonial theories relate the
quest of their individual hero or heroines to the past of their lives.
Salman Rushdie born in an Indian Muslim family is a postcolonial writer. After
graduating Rushdie returned home to Pakistan where his parents had moved, whilst
there he felt a sense of alienation having been so long away from his cultural roots
that he decided to return to England. This is a feeling that many of the postcolonial
writers identify with. Many of these writers like Salman Rushdie, Sunetra Gupta and
Rukhsana Ahmed are caught in between two cultures that in many cases are very
contrasting. It is very difficult for these writers to adapt to both cultures and because
of his they find it difficult to construct their identity. This is a problem that the
narrator Saleem Sinai faces in Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children.
The search for a country with secular ideals is one of the themes of Midnight's
Children. Rushdie makes an attempt to explore some of the darkness of that
experience by relating the family history of Saleem to the history of India's freedom
struggle. Saleem's search for identity parallels to and is directly connected with the
history of a nation that is constructing itself. Saleem was born at the hour that ends the
British Raj, sustains the identities of a narrator and becomes the consciousness of the
whole country. Saleem assumes many identities he is a distinctive mixture of the
creation of Indian culture and that of Islamic tradi…