Role Of Women In Midnight's Children

Salman Rusdie’s Midnight’s Children, is an intertextual, post-nationalist novel, that combines Indian history with magical realism and Indian mythology. The novel’s narrator Saleem Sinai, whose birth coincides with the birth of the Indian nation, experiences an existence that, as Jawaharlal Nehru—or perhaps his “fifteenth assistant under-secretary”—proclaims, is a mirror to the existence of the Indian nation. In moments of self-aggrandizement—that are consistent with Ramram Seth’s prophecy and Nehru’s disputed proclamation—Saleem tethers his fate to that of his “subcontinental twin sister.” So, as Saleem, in due course, begins to “crack all over like an old jug,” and is pulverized by “what-chews-on-bones,” the Indian state also begins down …show more content…
Of course, the book’s most blatant example of “active” and “literal” participation by women, in affecting the course of Indian history, is the actions of Indira Ghandi—or the Widow. Because Midnight’s Children is true to its classification as historiographic metafiction, Indira Ghandi carries out her historically designated role as India’s first female prime minister. Within the novel, Ghandi follows the script laid out for her by “history books newspapers radio-programs” and shapes the future of India directly and literally. Saleem’s narration places Ghandi at the center of his own life, as well as India’s political life, and, in the confines of the book, Ghandi reenacts the Emergency, and destroys the possibility of hope offered by the Midnight Children’s Conference. Indeed, within the novel it is evident that, “India is Indira and Indira is India.” To borrow Saleem’s oft repeated phrasing, “there’s no getting away from [it]” the character of Indira Ghandi in Midnight’s Children, alters the course of India’s history. Yet, Ghandi is far from the only female character in the novel whose actions reverberate through the book’s historical annals and many women in the novel—the consortium of Narlikar women who reshape Bombay/Mumbai’s coastline, for instance—get wrapped up in the historical layers of Rushdie’s magical