(Arundhati Roy)

          Nationalism is considered as an “ideology” which gives a nation, a pure sense of unity, by enforcing the set of identities like cultural, linguistic or historical. Nationalism is actually defining the nation against the Other, inside or outside the borders of a nation or state. Nationalism has also a subjective dimension too. The people belonging to any nation feel unity which exists beyond the class differences. It is the common concept that nation is always seen as a fraternity which holds privilege around the world. Benedict Anderson sees nation as an imagined community because the majority of the members are unable to meet each other personally. The community is visualized as limited by its borderline and sovereign. The mechanism of maintenance of National Identity is by border control, which actually means to control a nation by protecting it from the dissolution in other nation or culture.

          We can see that the nation building involves an extent of violence. It is exemplified in the ideology of patriotism as depicted by the army. The enterprise of the nationalists involves the conquering the peasantry by the landowners. These attempts have erupted violence in the two groups before the creation of national consciousness.  Juan R. I. Cole and Deniz Kandiyoti believe that it is actually the State which creates nation and the State is a natural result of Nation-Evolution. Through the State education, it imposes a Universal identity which creates a linguistic unity, a commonly shared history and culture. Many Nationalist claims a specific ethnic heritage. According to them, in the Post –Colonial Era, it was simply emancipated in the form of a national state. The claim to the ethnic heritage is no longer supported by the historians. Most often discontinuity is seen in the development of a nation historically. The majority regions of the Middle East and Central Asia were divided by colonial powers in States. As a result the national borders do not coincide with the racial and social identities. An increasing common type of divisive has been the rise of multiple internal nationalist. There are few types of Nationalism, as listed below:

·        Ethnic nationalism.

·        Romantic nationalism

·        Colonial nationalism

·        Post-colonial nationalism

·        Cultural nationalism

          In a colonial context, Nationalism is seen as a different phenomenon which has its own characteristics. Nationalist leaders of varying backgrounds shared a common interest in releasing the nation from the colonial rule. Nationalism, as Juan R. I. Cole and Deniz Kandiyoti noted in colonized countries, inclined to emerge from the agrarian (related to farmers) capitalism; large scale crop production for export. The peasantry utilizes the crops through national enterprise to drive out the colonizer and to control the production. Therefore Frantz Fanon complements it with cultural components of struggle as well as tensions among the Natives and the Imperialists. He proposes an action and reaction model in which the colonizer degrades they colonized; the intellectuals create a glorified and idealized insight of the past. Thus these intellectuals, in this way, control the imaginations of the people in developing the national enterprise and creating an independent state. An independent nation in a colonial context is about the convergence of following few facts:

·        Colonial power exploiting and denigrating the people.

·        A reaction by the landed elite to oppression.

·        Mobilization of the peasantry by both violent and cultural means (creating a national identity).

          The critical framework of this nationalism needs to be extended to the Post-Colonialism so that nationalist discourse can be contextualized in Western pattern. Like Benedict Anderson, Masao Miyoshi and several theorists, claims that the myth of modern nation (State) has its origins in the 1800, as a function of Colonialism, in the West. It was complemented by “myth of the mission civilisatrice”. In other words, Miyoshi states, “In the very idea of the nation state the colonialists found a politico-economical as well as moral-mythical foundation on which to build their policy and apology” (732).  Hence, the change in Colonialism was complemented by the establishment of the nation-states and national identity in the Western World and it was comprised by the duality of “Self” and the Deconstruction of the “Other”.

          Craig Calhoun in theorizing Nationalism postulates three dimensions; nationalism as ‘discourse’, project and as evaluation. Nationalism as a discourse is seen as the product of a cultural understanding and rhetoric to frame the aspirations of a people in terms of the idea of the nation and the national identity. Nationalism as a project is taken as social movements and state policies, through which people advance the interest of the collectiveness in historical progression with the help of increased participation of citizens in an existing states and their demands for independence and self-determination, or through the of territories. The final dimension of nationalism as evaluation that allows us to interpret the nation as a site for dissension, wherein

Political and cultural ideologies … claim superiority for a particular nation; these are often associated with movements or state policies, but need not be. In this third sense, nationalism is often given the status of an ethical imperative … It is through some of the actions that follow from these ethical imperatives that nationalism came to be associated with excesses of loyalty to one’s nation – as in ethnic cleansing, ideologies of national purification, and hostility to foreigners.                                    

(Craig Calhoun, Nationalism, 6)

          It is through the process of eradication of differences in the Nationalistic discourse that the gender, class and region are erased so that the ideology of homogenization among the people helps to maintain hegemonic patterns of domination as well as suppression. The criticism of nationalism as an ideology builds a force of homogenized people, where nationalism emerges as a discourse of the deletion of differences. The term “nation” is lamented by Eve Sedgwick and piles upon differences. She argues that there is no standard nation but the relativism is present among the citizen.

The “other” of the nation in a given political or historical setting maybe the pre-national monarchy, the local ethnicity, the diaspora, the trans-national corporate, ideological, religious or ethnic unit, the sub-national locale or the ex-colonial, often contiguous unit; the colony may become national vis-à-vis the homeland, or the homeland become national vis-à-vis the nationalism of its colonies; the nationalism of the homeland may be coextensive with or oppositional to its imperialism; so forth.

(Eve Sedgwick, “Nationalisms and Sexualities”,5)

          The nation is inevitably shaped by its various interpretations as “other”. Gayatri Spivak and other scholars like Ann McClintock and Sangeeta Ray have challenged the androcentric prejudices of imagining the nations as it were interrogation the trope of nation-as-a-woman. Thus, in the historical experience of feminism of national liberation movements, “the imaginings are regularly predicated upon construction of women’s bodies” (13). As Valerie Moghadam points out by quoting the example of how Taliban used the Purdah as a teasing point for the resistance against the modernization in Afghanistan.  Moghadam foregrounds some critical insights about Islamic fundamentalism by doing a comparative study between Iranian Revolution and the tribal based communism in Afghanistan. The divisions and irregularities in writing the narrative of Islamic nationalism become seriously clear. As she states:        

“Islamist ideologues reject national boundaries created by colonialism/imperialism which eventuated the dispersion and fragmentation of the Ummah Islam, the “imagined community” of believers. Rebuilding the Ummah is mandated by Iran’s Islamic Constitution of 1979. And yet, concrete Islamist movements – influenced as they are by twentieth century discourses and social structures – are also nationalist”.         

(Moghadam, “Revolution, Islam and Women: Sexual Politics in Iran and Afghanistan”, 425)

          The dangerous mixture of religion and politics acts as a catalyst in urging religious fundamentalism. India brings the agenda of political violence to the forefront with its Hindu revivalist movement. In discussing the eruption of Hindu nationalism in India, Spivak points out that there is not only the power brokers in the parties, who have the name of authoritative national identity historically, aided the forces of fundamentalism. She says;

“some professed anti-nationalists of the diasporic left, taking a passionate stand against religious nationalism in the country of origin, betrayed the power of the reactive nationalism of the ex-patriate” .

(Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present, 363).

          The nationalism of the new nation-state after 1947 was cherished as a Nehruvian dream of a secularizing, modernizing mission of nation-building which Maiello describes as “an illusive self-perception of a morally superior society anchored in the ethos of tolerance and brotherhood that relegated the harsh reality of religious identity to the backburner (100, Maiello “Ethnic Conflict in Postcolonial India,”). As an assertion of anti-Western sentiment, it disproves the colonial paradigm of divisive society and cast out the ghost of Partition. Secularism became its byline in this goal of territorial integrity and modernizing mission. The failure of the nation-state through the self-serving political governments to provide homogenized economic development of the nation, and has given birth to several anti-nationalism which threaten this state, Hindu fundamentalism being a primary competitor.

“Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill and no religion too, imagine all the people living life in peace.”

(John Lennon)

The struggle of freedom brought into focus the notion of nationalism and one can deal with the subject of ‘Nationalism and Literature’ very easily by describing patriotic writings “as an expression of nationalist intensity” of the people against the a foreign dominance which emerged in the 19th century particularly in each and every language. In the late Twentieth Century English icon John Lennon’s utopian hope of a borderless world openly links with the absence of nations to freedom and peace. A dream of a popular Western poet evokes the disturbing images, portraying the violence in human history, as generated by the notion of nation and nationalism. Immediately the memories of human sufferings and devastation disturb the citizens out of self-satisfaction which is linked with the naturalness of being living in nations. It makes the one more conscious of the impossibility of escaping from the fleeing from the discourses of nations and nationalisms.  It is so in the case of individuals who belong to the minorities, caught up in societies which are divided into racial, religious, cultural and linguistic lines.

          Among one of the central thematic concerns of the ‘Postcolonial Literature’ is the history, memory of the nation-state as well as the critical issues of a nation and nationalism which foregrounds the Post-Colonial spaces. The genocide, violence, persecution and humiliation on the grounds of religion, race and caste are the issues which are often arise by the fiction authors in their works. Therefore, the idea of a nation, in the Post-Colonial world, consequent upon the complex and varied colonial experience has a different significance for different sections of societies, remains a trouble.  It has been imagined as the cultural and political redemption, recovery, expression (of collective self), and reformation of colonial imbalances and also as a discourse. Its materiality makes it to resemble a network of codes whose significance brought it into existence and in accordance with the operations of power.

          If historically speaking, it is Marx and Gellner which attempts the breaking through of the naturalness of nations and nationalism begin to be made. Gellner recognizes the use of pre-existing past and to see nationalism as a part of modernization of society. Gellner sees nationalism as a direct consequence of the requirements of the industrialization. The rise of nationalism coincided with the needs of a universal education system according to the needs of a division of labor in industrialized societies.  Gellner denies an individual identity to the subjects of a nation by saying that, “for most of these men, however, the limits of their culture are the limits, not perhaps of the world, but of their own employability and hence dignity” (Nations 110). Gellner gives us a functional role in order to educate the individual of an industrial system by believing that “the state is above all, the protector, not of a faith, but of a culture, and the maintainer of the inescapable homogeneous and standardizing education system” (Nations 110).

          In the 21st century, the world is undergoing massive changes. The category of nation is being reconsidered under the new intellectual currents which are being prompted by the cultural globalizations as well as the rearranging the national at a global scale. It has given rise to restored investigation of the nations and the nationalism. There is seen a crisis at the core of nations and nationalisms as a result of an intense exploring of their credentials and growth of transnationalism, internationalism and globalization. When the terms like globalization, transnationalism and postnationalism seems to be gaining currency; nationalisms are reappearing all over the globe. As Guibernau view it as a contradiction that the nations and nationalism are particular and homogenized. As being a well-known, contemporary political theorist of nationalism and national diversity, further argues that     

“National identity is currently one of the most powerful forms of collective identity. National identity is based upon the sentiment of belonging to a specific nation, endowed with its own symbols, traditions, sacred places, ceremonies, heroes, history, culture and territory” (Catalan Nationalism 152).

          Guibernau also asserts that the common national identity always favors the bond among the members of a given community and allows them to imagine that community they belong to as a distinction from others. These ‘Others’ may be the people, belonging to other nation/states or from the minorities of religious and linguistic communities in the same nation. At the same time, those who enters cultural symbols, values, beliefs and customs by internalizing and conceiving them as a part while rejecting ‘Others’ as aliens . In this sense the identities “act as mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion, creating imaginary limits between those who belong and those who do not belong to specific communities” (Catalan Nationalism 3).

          Hence, it is very difficult to fix the denotation of the term ‘Nation’ as it connotes number of things. In the development of this term, the theorists have hinted at the opposite. Guibernau’s understanding of the inconsistencies between the terms ‘nation’, ‘state’ and ‘nation-state’ have been a subject of concern of many critics. Raymond William has expressed scepticism about the ‘jump’ from nation, as referring to natural relationships we are born into and to the modern nation-state. He writes:

‘Nation’ as a term is radically connected with ‘native’. We are   born into relationships which are typically settled in a place. This form of primary and ‘placeable’ bonding is of quite fundamental human and natural importance. Yet the jump from that to anything like the modern nation-state is entirely artificial.

(Brennan, “The National Longing for Form.”Literature in the Modern world: Critical Essays and Documents. 211)

          As the roots of Nationalism are not universally present, it is not considered as the destiny of the men. The mankind can be divided between ‘nationalism-prone’ and ‘nationalism-resistant’ groups and individuals, as called by Gellner. It is a clear historical fact that during the last two hundred years, more and more people have tended to belong to the nationalism –prone as a section of humanity. As a consequence of it, majority of the populations become more vocal of their identities and the minorities feel more threatened and alienated.

          The imperfections encoded in the postcolonial nation-states or relationship between the ideas of nation and state can be usefully utilized the viewpoint of the minority religious and ethnic community. However, the distance between theoretical accounts of nation and nationalism and their subjective representations in literature can be established through avoidance of any reference to the racial discrimination of the colonial period or the economic and administrative antecedents of postcolonial states in the colonial experience. It can also be said that the category of nation also involves a tactical balance of elisions and articulations. The ideas of nation and nationalism are marked by complexity. The analysis of the theory of nation and nationalism to its mapping in the overlapping contexts of Post-Colonial literature and Post-Colonial theory and the very important field of anti-colonial discourse.

          The fiction of authors like Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy and Shashi Tharoor tries to address about nation and nationalism. The ideal parameters of the nations and nationalisms have always been elusive. It would be appropriate to consider one of the standard definitions “The nation is a territorial relation of collective self-consciousness of actual and imagined duration” (Grosby 11-12). There are innumerable other ways in which discourses are related to the notions of nation and nationalism can be experienced, perceived and defined. There is a deep and riddling complexity and ideas which go into the making of national imagination. There are no perfect terms that can define the concept of nation and nationalism. But the study of any of the novels by Rushdie, Naipaul, Roy, Ghosh or Mistry may lead to explain this concept in the light of the Post-Colonial nationalism. The introduction to Oxford Reader on Nationalism lists the forms that nationalisms can assume. It includes, “religious, conservative, liberal, fascist, communist, cultural, political, protectionist, integrationist, separatist, irredentist, Diaspora, pan, etc.” (Hutchinson and Smith 3). ‘Nation’ and ‘Nationalism’ therefore can be seen as the most suitable terms. They are capable of utilizing and forming connections with several social, cultural and political institutions and belief systems.

          Midnight’s Children by Rushdie was like the milestone in the English Language migrant author living in Britain. Because “Western commercial appetite for the exotic” seems to point towards the suspicion that writings understood as postcolonial have a western orientation” (Teverson 6, Salman Rushdie: Contemporary World Writers). It undoubtedly leads towards a new dimension in theorizing the nation in the Post-Colonial fiction. In the concept of nation, the role of the Post-Colonial writer who is also a migrant is not transparent as well. After the success of Midnight’s Children, in Britain, the world was in search for other Rushdies. Rushdie carries out himself by emphasizing on his own fiction through his intense self-referentiality. He foregrounds the perspectives of his writing by valorizing his own location of culture. As one of the most representative writers of the Post-Colonial fiction, Rushdie’s description of his location is marked by postmodern uncertainties springing out to connect the fiction and the real. His Post-Coloniality does not lie in disconnecting from the West with the purpose of social, political and cultural reality. 

          In the novel Midnight’s Children Rushdie makes and unmakes history, blurring the boundaries between fiction and the facts of the history. Through the analysis of multiple aspects of this book, the complexities if the Post-Colonial nation are clarified. With the help of utilization of Rushdie’s location (as a Diaspora writer) and Benedict Anderson’s definition of the Nation leads to the flaws of historical narrative and false nationhood. From the Diasporic point of view, Rushdie is able to deconstruct history by writing between two realities. He presents the problem of historical narrative in a nation, India. In the meantime, he exposes the fabricated and constructed reality of the nation.

          In this novel, the narrator         Saleem Sinai is born at the midnight of August 15th, 1947, which is the exact moment of Indian independence. Midnight’s Children is widely understood as an allegory for the emerging nation. Salman Rushdie creates and recreates history which vague the limits between facts and fictions of the nation, by using this allegory throughout the text.  The domain of the Post-Modern fiction is mainly concerned with history. History can be seen as the sub-genre of Post-Modern metafiction, as Linda Hutcheson defines:

“The Post-Modern relationship between fiction and history is an even more complex one of interaction and mutual implication. Historiographic metafiction works to situate itself within historical discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction”.

          Midnight’s Children is historiographic metafiction that problematizes the notion of historical truth, without losing its authenticity as fiction. Brennan argues midnight’s Children as a “dismantling of Nationalism”. A singular historical narrative can only worth a singular concept of nation. Rushdie is deeply concerned with history and the nation itself. He is not arguing historical facts as false rather he is questioning ‘how history and the nation are perceived as singular entities’. Rushdie asserts the importance of fiction in contesting grand historical narratives and notions of the nation. Rushdie is able to deconstruct the history and the concept of universal truth, presenting the problem of historical narrative in India. Rushdie’s diasporic voice is analyzed through this novel. Benedict Anderson concept of the nation helps in analyzing the text of Midnight’s Children.

          Rushdie as a diasporic writer is important to Midnight’s Children problematization of history and the nation for two reasons; first, “the diasporic position is unique insider as well as an outsider that allows him to dismantle the nations of universality”. He left India for Britain when he was fourteen. His parents moved to Pakistan. Rushdie argues his plural position as unique platform for a writer to hold. Second; “the denial of the universality is vital to the identity of the diasporic writer”. The position of the diasporic writer is at best a straddling of two cultures and most often leads to a falling between. Hence, this position lacks the security of universality or a nation’s identity (as a singular entity). Therefore, the deconstructing of universality is very much the work diasporic voice.

          By exposing the multiplicity of history, Rushdie is creating a space for diasporic populations. Through the lens of Diaspora, he is able to expose the fictionality of the nations and historical narrative contesting the universality of the nation and history is the concept of diasporic writer. By unmaking notions of universality are proposed as authentic truth. A central project of Midnight’s Children is the assertion of the nation as a “fictional construct”. The concept of nation must be defined before peeping into the text.

          Benedict Anderson, the nationalist scholar, defines the Nation as “societal construct” of the imagination. He defines the Nation as:

“An imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited as Sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members meet them or even hear of them yet in the minds of each lives an image of their communion”.

          With the help of definition he actually exposed the false conciseness of nationhood. Nations are so large that yet nationalism still exists. Therefore, it is also exposed that in the order of the nation to exist an identity must be constructed by the imagination, and if the nation is a construct of the imagination then it is inherently a work of fiction. Nations of the mind might share common grounds but each imagined community is the fictional creation of the individual. Rushdie further uses this notion in the Midnight’s Children in order to construct nature of the Nation. Rushdie breaks down the nation, through the genealogy of Saleem, into its fictional form. Saleem can commonly be analyzed as an allegory; he can also be stroked as “Post-Colonial Indian Nation”. Rushdie uncovers the fictionality of nation. He also “explodes the notion of a nation having a stable identity and a single history”, through the allegorical family of the nation. Saleem’s family can also be defined as his “imagined” family, through this Rushdie proposes the idea that may be family lies in the imagination, not blood.

          Writing from a diasporic location, he is able to deconstruct notions of the national and historical singularity. If a Nation is an imagined community, there is still a need to have someone to imagine with. This is why the use of a frame narrative through the character of Padma is so important. Through this narrative, reader is brought closer to the text and imagines the nation with Saleem. Her reaction highlights pivotal moments in the text, for example, when Saleem exposes how he was switched at birth Padma reacts “Enough” Padma sulks. “I do not want to listen”. Rushdie utilizes this frame narrative to bring the readers closer to the point in the text. Finally through the dialogical relationship between Saleem and Padma, the text is given an overt sense of morality.

“Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist” (Gellner, Thought, 168).

The Nation does not exist as a physical entity, but lives and speaks to us through the culture-soul. The treatment of novels like Midnight’s Children is seen with the global economic realities to generate a discourse of globalization. Brennan and Anderson emphasize the role of capitalism in activating the nationalist imaginary. With Rushdie’s aspect of this novel, other novelists are inspired to make their writings focused on the social, political, national and cultural issues of their country. This book is actually Rushdie’s interpretation of a period of about 70 years of the modern history of India, dealing with the events, which leads to the partition. There is a unity between the public and the national threads which completes this book. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children has completely transformed the Indian novel in English. His narrator collects obscure items from the past and collates them together to make a sense of history. This kind of speculative construction of the past through fragmentary evidence constitutes an important aspect of the Post-Modern narratives.

          Saleem, the protagonist in Midnight’s Children, identifies with the fate of his country. He is born at midnight on 15th August, 1947, the date on which India got independence. He is a native alien, hopeless and unfortunate victim of history. He leads an aimless life. Saleem’s life is a punctured sheet and he feels a hole in the center of his body. He is a part of the history, reduced this partitioned state by the India- Pakistan war of 1965. He is the self conscious narrator oscillates between the past and the present, the historical and the personal. He has no stable identity, but assumes many identities. He is a fragment, yet complete. His inner life is the function of the historical forces affecting his state. He is Rushdie’s alter ego and an allegorical representation of India’s independence and the life of Saleem is really the history of independence. He is by turns aggressive, shy, harsh, rebellious, disrespectful and grave. He is pouring a long narrative out all at one go in breathless haste in a large paragraphs without any full stop.

          Saleem’s literally disintegrating and split body, from which history pours out in an allusions to the underlying political fragmentation and tendencies of Indian politics past and present which have continued to the making of its history. The bane of Indian society and politics runs through the theme and technique of the novel. Saleem’s life covers the period from independence to the lifting of the emergency. He does not seem to lack an identity, it is only that multiple identities press upon him, a mirror of the fragmentation and multiplicity of Indian society and the confusion of social, religious, regional and provincial identities which India suffer. Midnight’s Children expands with life, abundance and fantasy. It is hailed as an exuberant epic of India, fanatic epic, many voiced mixture, composition of autobiography. It shows epic, fable, national events, family saga, advertisement, films, popular songs, newspapers, flipping, gossip, could all be gathered up in one comprehensive sweep. It is a hybrid tale of India, incorporating complicated web of Hindu and Islamic motives, philosophies Sufism, interweaving private, personal, public political histories of the subcontinent.

          The study of Post-Modern novels with special reference and emphasis on Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie is to look at the narrative techniques and the representation of India. It promotes intelligent criticism and illuminating reviews and has succeeded in stirring the collective consciousness into an activity of rethinking and redefining the roles and identities of the world order. Exposing the nation as “an abstract construct”, he creates a space for himself and the diasporic populations in nationhood. He claims to dismantle the universal nationhood and reclaims the nation of the imagination. Midnight’s Children was published in 1980’s. The emergence of such work hints at a Post-Colonial shift in the history of the nations. The novel actually expresses and complicates how nations are constructed.

The central focus of nation and nationalism from colonial struggle and postcolonial reality has been one of the major concerns of Postcolonial Studies Discourse. After the ending of Post-Colonial phase, the critical thought begins to re-interrogate the legitimacy and legality of colonial as well as native self0-assertion. After the end of colonial rule it revises and renews it perspectives on the questions of nation and nationalism. The contemporary Post-Colonial estimates dealing with the idea of nation have become more self-reflexive. The postcolonial Indian novel in English has been obsessively concerned with the problems of the Post-Colonial India.

“Nationalism is not what it seems, and above all it is not what it seems to itself. The cultures it claims to defend and revive are often its own inventions, or are modified out of all recognition. Nonetheless the nationalist principle as such, as distinct from each of its specific forms, and from the individually distinctive nonsense which it may preach, has very deep roots in our shared current condition, is not at all contingent, and will not easily be denied”. (Gellner, Nations 56).