Rushdie's Narrative Mode: Indian Oral Cum Postmodern Self-reflexivity in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Abstract

Being led by the novelist's illusion of being "GOD”, Salman Rushdie was able to encompass multitudes in his booker prize winner novel Midnight's Children. He gets out of his depth in attempting to encompass the whole Indian subcontinent's historical and geographical diversity in allegorical framework. Through the presentation and examination of the temporal and cultural status of India as an independent nation in Midnight's Children, Rushdie articulates the western educated, liberal Indian's inability to comprehend the Indian reality; an inability revealed in him by his recourse to allegory and fantasy. This paper tells about Rushdie's tendency of striving for a system through which he presents his text Midnight's Children along with post-colonial Indian history to examine both the effects of the indigenous and non-indigenous cultures on the Indian mind and in the light of Indian independence. This novel; therefore, as a post-colonial text has turned out to be a wonderful text for the narrative style of Rushdie for using the devices that signify Indian culture, religion and story-telling, Western drama and cinema, the episodic causality bearing strong influence of post-modernist novels as well as principles of the Indian art forms.