Saleem Sinai – a native alien and a hopeless and hapless victim of history, leads a life of anguish and isolation. Since he cannot undo the historical injustices and establish his “rootedness”, he takes recourse to fantasy and myth to discover his “imaginary roots” which lies here and everywhere, dispersed and scattered. Saleem seeks to resolve his agonizing problems of identity by withdrawing himself into the realm of fantasy:
Saleem sees the isolated facts of history only as they relate to him as an individual, only a fragment of the societal self and not to society as a whole. Rushdie himself writes in Midnight's Children:
Saleem Sinai's metaphoric equivalence of his life story to that of India constitute, surely, the novel's most extraordinary bid for unity. He is the joint product, as is India, of Hindu, Muslim and English influences. He is closely related with history. He says that as a midnight's child born at the birth of the new nation he is “mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.” He also asserts, “my inheritance includes this gift, the gift of inventing new parents for …show more content…
In the words of Linda Hutcheon, “The formal technique of “magic realism”, with its characteristic mixing of the fantastic and the realist has been singled out by many critics as one of the points of conjunction of post -modernism and post colonialism." (131) Magic realism with its profound use of fantasy can, thus, be seen as a device binding Indian culture of the past to the contemporary multicultural interface. Rushdie's principal use of magic realism in the text involves the telepathic abilities of Saleem and the other thousand and one children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15th,
Saleem sees the isolated facts of history only as they relate to him as an individual, only a fragment of the societal self and not to society as a whole. Rushdie himself writes in Midnight's Children:
Saleem Sinai's metaphoric equivalence of his life story to that of India constitute, surely, the novel's most extraordinary bid for unity. He is the joint product, as is India, of Hindu, Muslim and English influences. He is closely related with history. He says that as a midnight's child born at the birth of the new nation he is “mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.” He also asserts, “my inheritance includes this gift, the gift of inventing new parents for …show more content…
In the words of Linda Hutcheon, “The formal technique of “magic realism”, with its characteristic mixing of the fantastic and the realist has been singled out by many critics as one of the points of conjunction of post -modernism and post colonialism." (131) Magic realism with its profound use of fantasy can, thus, be seen as a device binding Indian culture of the past to the contemporary multicultural interface. Rushdie's principal use of magic realism in the text involves the telepathic abilities of Saleem and the other thousand and one children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15th,