Saleem Sinai, one of 1001 children born on the stroke of midnight as India gained independence from Britain, narrates his life in order to fight his illness that is causing him to crack. With a brain gifted with telepathy, and an inherited nose that can smell danger, the midnight children, with Saleem at the forefront, find themselves having an obligation to save India from its failing government. But, Saleem also possesses the characteristics that Shadi Neimneh pinpoints as that of a modern anti-hero; Saleem is, “lacking in largeness, grace, power, and social success,” (Neimneh 77). Saleem, destine to be a hero from the moment of his birth, narrates his failures of becoming a hero, which includes his failures of being a leader, a lover, and a blood-linked family member. Saleem’s narration fails multiple times throughout the novel, even when he mentions important political figures. Saleem provides the reader with the incorrect date of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, which Rushdie says was, “a way of telling the reader to maintain a healthy distrust,” (IH, 25). In fact, Saleem is not the only character who fails. Indira Gandhi, who Saleem calls the Widow, is described having no positive attributes, and is a big reason as to why Saleem believes India fails to be a successful post-colonial country. As many critics including Neil Kortenaar argue, “The life of Saleem Sinai is ‘merely’ an extended metaphor of the literal narrative of history,” (Kortenaar, 29), therefore suggesting that Saleem’s failures of narration, heroism, leadership, love, and family relations, holds significance in relation to the history of India. However, Saleem’s failure to be India’s hero does not mean that India, or the want-to-be hero, inherently fails. Rather, the failures become just as important as the victories when it comes to creating social and political change; Saleem allows India to learn from his mistakes, therefore becoming unconventionally heroic.
Because of the Ramayana and other Indian folklore and mythology, heroism is no new territory. However, it is not conventional for a hero who is predestined to succeed, like Saleem, to fail. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem instigates the murders of Lila and Homi, by writing an anonymous letter to Commander Sabarmati, fueled by his anger of his own mother’s affair. Lila is having an affair, like his mother, and feels Commander Sabarmati, her husband, must be told. Saleem writes him a letter through newspaper clippings, perhaps calling the reader to question if Saleem himself is writing this letter, or if India is, represented by words of other people from the newspaper. Commander Sabarmati ends up shooting and killing both Lila and Homi after discovering them together. In an interview with Durix, Rushdie uses this violent affair as an example of how India deems and views someone as heroic. This is a true story, and Rushdie says very little is changed in the book. Rushdie says in the interview that this became a test case for India. The jury didn’t want to convict someone of murder who was good looking, popular, and powerful. Rushdie said that newspapers, “…Compared the Nanavati story to the Ramayana story and said that, if this was Rama, would we be sending him to jail? So there's this kind of dispute between the laws of heroism and the rule of law. In the end he was sent to jail. And that was a major decision by India about itself," (Durix 11). Perhaps to the Indian majority, represented by the jury, the classic Indian hero is like Rama; good looking, popular, involved in war. But this notion was fought in real life when the judge overruled the jury and sent the Commander to jail. Rushdie disagrees with this image of a hero, and by making Saleem the opposite, an anti-hero, it allows the reader to understand that Rushdie is attempting to reverse the notion that only a stereotypical hero can be the one to save India. Neimnah writes, “Although anti-heroes lack accomplishment and strength, this does not make them utterly unheroic…the modernist anti-hero can transcend the ironic to effect some sort of regeneration or salvation,” (Neimneh 78). In agreeance with Neimneh in their definition of an anti-hero, Saleem’s existence proves that you do not need to look or act like Rama to create social, cultural, and political change. Change is birthed from the critique of problems and the self, so we may understand when failure occurs and improvise next time.
Saleem’s life is full of coincidences that connect him to his country. He is born on the hour of India’s independence, his face represents a map of India, and he is seemingly “handcuffed to history,” (Rushdie 3). In fact, the Prime Minister tells him, “‘Your life, which will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own,’” (Rushdie 272). The amount of connections between Saleem and India seem countless. Jean Kane argues, “His chronicle alone remains as the material container of national meaning, for the nation dies with Saleem’s body,” (Kane 96), suggesting that Saleem’s physical failures become India’s failures, and Saleem’s physical successes become India’s successes. Also commenting on Saleem’s physical appearance in relation to India is Kortenaar. Saleem has an extremely large nose filled with snot, is not the most attractive of men, and his face seems to outline the coast of India. Kortenaar describes this as, “the metaphor of the nation as a person is made literal and thereby comical: if India were a person it would be a grotesque such as Saleem, its paternity would be in dispute, and its ability to tell its story would be in question,” (Kortenaar 33). Saleem is India humanized, through his failures and misfortunes, which makes sense when recalling Indian politics and history. Realistically, Indian history is not full of successes, therefore Saleem the character is not either.
If you never fail, you never truly learn from your mistakes. Rushdie admits in Imaginary Homelands Saleem struggles to live a successful life, socially and politically. He writes that he was trying to write the story, “in a manner designed to echo, as closely as my abilities allowed, the Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration…The form multitudinous, hinting at the infinite possibilities of the country is the optimistic counterweight to Saleem's personal tragedy,” (IH 16). Therefore, the unpopular moments Saleem fails, since he represents the history of India, become the moments that the country can use to grow. Su takes this argument even further by saying, “Failure guarantees that the novel will not reproduce the orthodoxies it is meant to critique,” (Su 554). Through these orthodoxies of failures and mistakes in the book, such as Saleem’s failure to be a leader, a hero, a lover, a narrator, and a family member, it becomes popular knowledge that the methods that caused him to fail should not be repeated if a different result is desired. Creating characters that fail to make meaningful change has a new meaning, for they become the moments of value in the book. They signify what needs to be worked on to encourage change, and they spark the revolution and provoke the question of what revolutionaries can do to do better next time. Rushdie also mentions “the optimism disease” multiple times throughout the book. While being at war with China in 1962, India responds with great optimism, that spreads like an epidemic. The newspapers write the peoples faith in the government has been restored. Rather than latch on to some positivity like his parents and the rest of the country, Saleem writes, “The air, thickened by optimism, refused to enter my lungs…Adrift in the sea of optimism, we – the nation, my parents, I – floated blindly towards the reefs,” (343). Perhaps in these moments in the novel, Rushdie is suggesting optimism does not create change, only ignorance, and that pessimism and failure are acceptable, if not encouraged when viewing the Indian government in order to make it even better.
As mentioned previously, as the main character with a destiny to represent India, Saleem fails to be the hero of Midnight’s Children. There are these moments in the novel that express Saleem’s importance to India, such as his birth on the stroke of midnight followed by Nehru’s letters of admiration, and his supernatural gift of thought-reading. The book presents Saleem as a hero through these character developing moments, but Saleem seems to never reach the level of heroism that was laid out for him since the moment of his birth. Marinescu writes, “Young Saleem finds himself prisoner in a contradictory world he feels he has to fix due exactly to its contradictory traditional-modern character,” (Marinescu 133). Saleem becomes trapped in the expectation of becoming a hero, thus hindering him from doing anything heroic. To give Saleem less credit, Rushdie talks about this relationship between hero and failure, and says in an interview, “it is a fundamentally comic inversion because, of course, he doesn't really contain the world, he only thinks he does...He's not in charge,” (Chaudhuri, 25). Saleem was never meant to be a hero from the start, according to Rushdie. All of the moments in Saleem’s life that cause the reader to think he might be a heroic figure seem to build Saleem’s ego rather than heroic ability. Saleem does not deliberately or thoughtfully enforce change in India in any heroic way. Most of the change he enforces happens on accident. When Saleem crashes his bike into an angry crowd, he becomes, “Directly responsible for triggering off the violence that which ended with the partition of the state of Bombay, as result of which the city became the capital of Maharashtra,” (Rushdie 219), known as the Bombay language riots that killed 15 and wounded over 300 people. In fact, Saleem narrates, “most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence,” (Rushdie 14), admitting that he himself has not done anything heroic to influence change in his life or India, but rather, change occurs over time. Change cannot spur at the snap of a failed hero’s fingers.
Because Saleem fails to be the hero in Midnight’s Children, most of his other efforts that could be seen as heroic fail as well, especially in the failure to lead the Midnight Children’s Conference. Saleem creates the MCC when he turns ten, as a way to connect with the other children who were born at midnight that also appear to hold the power to create the perfect independent India. He should be the leader over Shiva, he thinks, and his reasons are the following when Shiva debates him, “‘But history,’ I say, ‘And the Prime Minister who wrote me a letter…and you don’t even believe in…who knows what we might…’” (Rushdie 253). It seems as if Saleem isn’t sure why he should be the leader as well, other than that it is his destiny. When Saleem moves to Pakistan, he can no longer hear the MCC. At the end of the novel, the conference, now adults, are drained of their communicative abilities by Indira Gandhi, and Saleem reacts, “Now, as the midnight children lost faith in me, they also lost their belief in the thing I had made for them…But optimism, like a lingering disease, refused to vanish; I continued to believe – I continue now-that what-we-had-in-common would finally have outweighed what-drove-us-apart. No: I will not accept the ultimate responsibility for the end of the children’s conference,” (Rushdie, 342). Saleem doesn’t completely lose hope in the idea of the MCC, and doesn’t seem to think that the ideologies it created has really ended. Like Saleem, Kane argues even though the MCC fails in the end, “The Midnight's Children Conference represents the dream of romantic nationalism,” (Kane 100). Like Kane, Su agrees that not all is lost when the conference is split; “To the extent that the children represent the promise of post-independence India itself, their endurance signifies the continuing of hope for a democratic and egalitarian nation state,” (Su 551). Although the Midnight Children’s Conference may no longer exists, it’s ideas and creative thought do. It represented a democratic, nationalist party that was truly craved in India. Saleem’s failure of making a successful conference does not make it a complete loss, for the passion the children have for an equal, independent India were cultivated here and live on.
Saleem and his sister The Brass Monkey were close friends and siblings. But, as soon as The Brass Monkey was named Jamila Singer because of her nationalistic Pakistani songs, their relationship shifted, and Saleem went from being the favorite child to the failure child. When the family moved to Pakistan, “Saleem’s parents said, ‘We all must become new people’; in the land of the pure, purity became our ideal. But Saleem was forever tainted with Bobayness, his head was full of all sorts of religions apart from Allah’s; and his body was to show a marked preference for the impure,” (355). Saleem feels he was never meant to be Pakistani, because he feels religiously and physically different than them, thus, meaning he fails to be a pure Pakistani. His sister, however, succeeds at this, and Saleem recognizes, “as I listened to ‘My Red Dupatta Of Muslin’ and ‘Shahbaz Qalandar,’ that the process which had begun during my first exile was nearing completion in my second; that, from now on, Jamila was the child who mattered, and that I must take second place to her talent for ever,” (336). Because Jamila assimilated to the land of the pure, she is celebrated. Saleem seems to think that he fails to assimilate to Pakistan’s idea of purity because his view is distorted by the negatives of the country. Having the same opportunities as Jamila, he says, “My nose, her voice: they were exactly complementary gifts; but they were growing apart. While Jamila sang patriotic songs, my nose seemed to prefer to linger on the uglier smells which invaded it…so that while she rose into the clouds, I fell into the gutter,” (361). Saleem is hanging on to the negatives, while Jamila hangs onto the positives; the two sibling become opposites. Once again, Rushdie alludes to this sense of blind optimism. Because Saleem fails to be patriotically pure like Jamila, it could mean that he does not agree with the hypocrisy of Pakistan’s “purity”. For example, Jamila, who represents the voice of the nation, showed interest in Christianity as a child, and Saleem ends up falling in incestuous love with her, perhaps suggesting the nation isn’t as pure as it portrays to be. Because Saleem fails to assimilate to Pakistani purity like his sister, he fails as a brother and a son. His father exclaims his pride for his daughter while Saleem watches in shame, (369) and his gift of being the first born of the nation melts and golden child away. Saleem admits his failure to assimilate into Pakistani culture, “and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence – that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities, and lies,” (373). Because Saleem failed to assimilate into lies and falselessness, he represents his ability to think freely and steer clear of hypocrisy.
Saleem, unlike familiar fairytale heroes who save the country and “get” the girl, he fails as a lover. First, as the preceding paragraph mentions, he falls in love with his sister who he thinks represents a “new wholeness” that he has been missing since being in Pakistan. Kane writes, “Jamila, as Pakistan, becomes the missing and inaccessible part that Saleem, as India, incestuously desires to repossess,” (Kane 111). Incest is illegal in many countries, and the idea of it is backwards and immoral to most. Because Saleem and Jamila are not necessarily blood related, it cannot be labeled as incest, which may defend Saleem’s immoral decision to pursue Jamila. However, the two did grow up as blood-related, making this attraction sinful and corrupt. Saleem fails to love Jamila as a sister. Saleem explores with the themes of lust and love further, for, “While Jamila explored holiness and love-of-country, I explored profanity and lust,” (Rushdie 364). Saleem meets the oldest prostitute in the world, Tai Bibi, who can secrete any smell of a woman a man may desire. Saleem likes her at first because they share the same passion for smells. However, “Tai Bibi with the relentlessness of her cackling antiquity presses on, “Oho yes, certainly, your lady-love, little sahibzada – who? Your cousin, maybe? Your sister…’ Saleem’s hand is tightening into a fist; the right hand, despite mutilated finger, contemplates violence…” (Rushdie 366). Tai Bibi exposes Saleem’s shame. In a way, she also exposes his hypocrisy towards the way he loves or lusts after her and Jamila. By exposing this, she reveals his incestuous desire, and his thinking that sleeping with a random woman will fix this craving. He fails to own his twisted thinking about these two women. Further, as a child, Saleem has a crush on Evie Burns, the rugged American. He sabotages this blossoming friendship because he cannot help but read her thoughts with his power of mindreading, and she yells at him to get out. Saleem learns through this failure, “When you go deep inside someone’s head, they can feel you in there,” (Rushdie 219). He and Evie do not talk anymore after that day, and through this failure of coming on too strong towards women, he is able to have more mature relationships as he grows older. Saleem’s most successful relationship in the novel is with Parvati-the-witch. However, now that Saleem is an adult, he understands the hinderance his sterilization has on his love life. Saleem’s sterilization forces him to fail to have his own biological son. Parvati, being the smart witch she is, sleeps with Shiva, the true son of Saleem’s parents, and becomes pregnant. Saleem, living with Parvati in the Magician’s Ghetto, decides to save her reputation by marrying her because she is pregnant out of wedlock. Although Saleem fails to have his own biological son, the son of Shiva is the biological grandson of Saleem’s father. Therefore, the Sinai genealogy is continued, and in a way, this son has more connections to Saleem than Shiva. The last relationship that Saleem tells the reader of is his engagement to Padma, the woman who listens to his stories. The reader does not know the outcome of this relationship, but the reader knows that Saleem is ill, and that they are getting married “suddenly” (Rushdie 528). To sum it up, in agreeance with Kane, “His romantic relations with other women are emotionally less compelling and often remain unconsummated. Saleem's sexual impotence as an adult results literally from his castration by Indira Gandhi, who regards the members of the Midnight's Children Conference (except for Shiva) as political enemies,” (Kane 111). Saleem fails to love women successfully. However, these failures allow Saleem to emphasize the hypocrisy in Pakistan, as well as have a son that resembles his own.
Saleem’s entire family passes away, besides Jamila, who decides the best thing to do is to send him to fight in the 1971 Bangladesh war for Pakistan, against India. Saleem, although never signing up for this position, fails at being the war hero the reader expects him to be. After his family passes away, he suffers from amnesia, and fails to remember his name and many other memories, until a snake bites his foot and the memories start to return. He refers to himself as the Buddha. His job is to be a “man-dog” and sniff out bombs. He tells Padma, “When Mujib was arrested, it was I who sniffed him out. (They had provided me with one of his old shirts; it’s easy when you’ve got the smell,)” (Rushdie 409). Although Saleem fails to be on the front lines and instead works as a bomb-sniffing sacrificial dog for the other soldiers, he helps the army succeed in arresting the father of Bangladesh, a very important war move. During the war, Saleem narrates:
“Although I am well aware that I am providing any future commentators or venom-quilled critics (to whom I say: proved stronger than venenes) with yet more ammunition – through admission-of-guilt, revelation-of-moral-turpitude, proof-of-cowardice – I’m bound to say that he, the buddha, finally incapable of continuing in the submissive performance of his duty, took to his heels and fled. Infected by the soul-chewing maggots of pessimism futility shame, he deserted, into the historyless anonymity of rain-forests, dragging three children in his wake,” (Rushdie 414).
Saleem fails to be loyal to the army but succeeds in abandoning the war that asks him to kill his Hindu childhood friends. Now astray in the jungle, and after Saleem is bit by the snake that cures his amnesia, then men reach a Hindu temple that invigorates their passion to survive. This, the men understood:
“…was the last and worst of the jungle’s tricks, that by giving them their heart’s desire it was fooling them into using up their dreams so that as their dream-life seeped out of them they became as hollow and translucent as glass…awakened by the first time by the shock of translucency, they looked at the temple with new eyes, seeing the great gaping cracks in the solid rock, realizing the cast segments could come detached and crash down upon them at any moment,” (Rushdie 422).
The irony in Saleem being named the Buddha and the Hindu temple allowing the men to reach enlightenment proves that the forest helped the men see what they needed to see in order to survive. By failing to fight in the war, the men become lost, and in the end, they find themselves as one would in Buddhism or Hinduism, two prominent religions of India. The forest saves them from war and from fear and gives them life, “it seemed as if the jungle having tired of its playthings, were ejecting them unceremoniously from its territory…borne out of the heart of the jungle of dreams, into which I had fled in hope of peace and found both less and more,” (Rushdie 423). Failing to be the war hero of Pakistan allows Saleem to find internal peace and enlightenment. Failing to move from the Hindu temple allows him to clearly exit the forest with a newfound view of life. Failing to fight in the war also leads him to Parvati-the-witch in the Magicians Ghetto, which allows Saleem to remember his name and have a son that resembles his own.
Saleem fails at accurately narrating his life story, so he cannot be considered a reliable narrator. But, that doesn’t mean he can be considered an honest narrator. As he narrates, he starts to lose his own trust in his ability to narrate successfully. He rushes to put the story down on paper because he is worried his mysterious cracking illness will kill him and his memories. Saleem writes, “This is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters),” (Rushdie 36). In a way, Saleem is reliving his failures on these pages as a kind-of manifesto, so India remembers what not to do if they wish to succeed. One of the biggest failures in Saleem’s narration occurs when he tells the reader that Shiva never really died, and he admits to lying to the reader:
To tell you the truth, I lied about Shiva’s death. My first out-and-out lie… whatever anyone may think, lying doesn’t come easily to Saleem, and I’m hanging my head in shame as I confess…That’s why I fibbed, anyway; for the first time, I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in ones memories and the words in which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred,” (Rushdie 510).
There is power in narrating because the reader will take what is said as truth. The past only exists in memories, and because memories are ambiguous, anything can be considered truth. Saleem fails to narrate accurately and honestly at first, but catches himself because it is unusual for him to not learn from his failures. On the other hand of Saleem’s narration, he has other moments of absolute certainty while narrating. Unlike a reliable narrator, he asks the reader to check the facts themselves if they do not believe him. He expresses a bit of insecurity, and says, “Dogs? Assassins?... If you don't believe me, check. Find out about Mian Abdullah and his Convocations. Discover how we've swept his story under the carpet …then tell me how Nadir Khan, his lieutenant, spent three years under my family's rugs,” (Rushdie 49). Once again, Saleem is reminding the reader that India is full of forgetters, and by narrating this story, he is exposing this information, and keeping the memory alive. He does not want people to repeat, or forget, the truth. Inviting the reader to fact check is a kind of failed narration, but it calls the reader to participate in Saleem’s truth. To bring it all together, Rushdie writes in Errata: or Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s Children, that, “Reality is built on our prejudices, misconceptions and ignorance as well as on our perceptiveness and knowledge,” (IH 25). Therefore, there is truth and honesty in all words that are spoken and written by Saleem. Instead of writing Midnight’s Children as an encyclopedia, Rushdie writes the book through the memories, the truths, of those who lived in history, not just those who study one side of the history. In addition to Saleem’s failed memories working as truths, John Su argues that, “Saleem’s failure as a narrator preserves the promise of democratic ideals in the novel,” (Su 554). Through Saleem’s failed narration, the reader learns the true, raw, exposed, side of history, as well as the right to free thought, which India so greatly craved during the Emergency in 1975. Saleem’s failure to be a cookie-cutter narrator can prove to be a successful way to tell his truth, his story.
It would not be fair to single out Saleem’s failures in the novel when Rushdie writes of the failures of others, as well. One of the biggest controversies to come from this novel is the incorrect date of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. Mentioned in a previous paragraph, Saleem incorrectly states the date as a way for Rushdie to insert distrust between the reader and Saleem’s narration. This does of course explain why Saleem fails to narrate, but, it also explains as to why Rushdie refuses to show success in his novel. Su agrees, and argues, “The clearest indication of Rushdie’s unwillingness or inability to produce heroic models, according to this argument, is the bizarre absence of Mahatma Gandhi from Midnight’s children. Rather than depicting the epic tales of resistance initiated by Mahatma Gandhi, the novel returns repeatedly to the sectarianism and tyranny instituted by Indira Gandhi,” (Su 548). Therefore, if Rushdie were to include the optimism given to the world by Mahatma Gandhi, Saleem and the nation of India would have the same disease of optimism that Saleem and Rushdie so greatly criticize. The only time in the book Saleem exclaims positivity, it also hurts him, “Optimism, growing like a rose in a dung-heap: it hurts me to recall it,” (Rushdie 520). The main political figure of the novel is Indira Gandhi, the leader of the Congress Party and the Prime Minister. She is named “The Widow” by Saleem, and he describes her in a nightmare:
“The Widow sits on a high high chair the chair is green the seat is black the Widow’s hair has a center-parting it is green on the left and on the right black. High as the sky the chair is green the seat is black the Widow’s arm is long as death its skin is green the fingernails are long and sharp and black. Between the walls the children green the walls are green the Widow’s arm comes snaking down the snake is green the children scream the fingernails are black they scratch the Widow’s arm is hunting see the children run and scream the Widow’s hand curls round them green and black,” (Rushdie 238).
Saleem has every right to be critical of Indira because of her controversial decisions in leading India. In the novel, she was the one that sterilized him. She was the one that bulldozed the Magician’s Ghetto and killed Parvati-the-witch. Su writes, “Rushdie repeatedly attacked Indira Gandhi and the ruling congress party in essay and interviews; Midnight’s children was his first major attempt in fiction to address the ‘betrayal’ of India by its government,” (Su 549). Indira fails to run a successful India, and she fails Indian citizens by stripping them of their rights. Rushdie didn’t need to put so much emphasis on Indira’s failures in the novel, but he did for a specific reason. Brennon thinks that Saleem and the Widow are closer than we think, “If [Saleem] himself is India, by contains its variety and by purveying the illusion of causing its events to happen, then he resembles no one so much as Indira Gandhi following her suspicion of civil rights in 1975,” (Brennon 108). Saleem is India as Indira is India. Simply because one has more power than the other does not mean they are any less a representative of India. Su takes Indira and Saleem’s failures further by arguing, “Instead, such works call into question the very possibility of ending, thereby insinuating that victors cannot dictate history any more than their victims can,” (Su 551). Because these powerful political figures fail, it reminds us that the leaders of failed countries are no more successful or better than the victims in which their failures affect, creating a victory in the sense that victims, being the product of failure, are not failure themselves.
The idea of permitting failure is not a unique concept of Rushdie’s specifically to Midnight’s Children. He mentions the same theme in Shame and The Satanic Verses. In Shame, Rushdie questions through narration, “I am no less disappointed in my hero than I was; not being the obsessive type, I find it difficult to comprehend his obsession,” (Shame 208). Rushdie, or the narrator, calls one of the characters a hero, and also questions his actions as if they are incorrect, untrustworthy, or wrong, in his opinion. In The Satanic Verses, a main character Saladin’s father recalls a picture he is fond of. He says, “‘I like these pictures,’ Changez Chamchawala told Zeeny, ‘because the hero is permitted to fail,’” (The Satanic Verses 70). Rushdie must hold the concept of failure close to his heart, since it is mentioned in all three texts. Therefore, it is not a fluke, that it is a central theme in Midnight’s Children.
Saleem, the ultimate anti-hero of Midnight’s Children, resembles so much more than a pessimistic failure. He is born with the power of mind reading at the stroke of India’s independence. He has a face that resembles the geography of India itself. Nehru said himself that he will resemble India as he grows. Saleem has all of these things going for him, yet he fails to fill in the shoes as the hero of India. He is the opposite of Rama, the handsome, heroic symbol of war. In fact, during the Bangladesh war, Saleem hides in the woods instead of fighting. He fails to be a leader of the Midnight Children’s Conference. He fails to hold up the name as the favorite child once The Brass Monkey becomes Jamila Singer. He fails as a lover to Jamila Singer, Tai Bibi, Evie Burns, Parvati-the-witch and Padma, and he fails at narrating accurately. All of this failure equates to his exclamation towards the end of the novel, “Children, something is being born here, in this dark time of our captivity; let Widows do their worst; unity is invincibility! Children: we’ve won!” (Rushdie 502). Saleem understands that the best growth comes from the lowest points. In order to succeed, one must fail. In order to swim, one must drown. In order to create a successful, inclusive India, India must fail. Learning from failures is a must if growth is desired. The issue with the modern hero is that they are perfect, but perfection does not realistically exist. Saleem, however, is realistic, and he succeeds in influencing India to grow through his failures. Rushdie writes, “We must live, I’m afraid, with the shadows of imperfection,” (Rushdie 529). If we live with all of our failures, imagine all we could learn.
Work Cited
Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for form” Salman Rushdie and the Third World, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1989, pp. 79-117.
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Durix, Jean-Pierre. “Salman Rushdie (1982).” Conversations with Salman Rushdie, edited by Michael Reder, University Press of Mississippi, 2000, pp. 8-16.
Kane, Jean M., and Salman Rushdie. “The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History: Salman Rushdie's ‘Midnight's Children.’” Contemporary Literature, vol. 37, no. 1, 1996, pp. 94–118. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1208752.
Kortenaar, Neil ten. “‘Midnight’s Children’ and the Allegory of History.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 26, no. 2, Apr. 1995, pp. 41–62. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=1995060112&site=eds-live.
Marinescu, Alina Petra. “Saleem Sinai - Number One of the 1001 Midnight’s Children.” Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology & Sociology, vol. 3, no. 2, Winter 2012, pp. 129–136. EBSCOhost, www.search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=85818597&site=eds-live.
McFadden, Ronan. “The Reliability of the Narrator in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.” MA Comparative Literature, Centre for Intercultural Studies , 2008, www.ucl.ac.uk/opticon1826/archive/Issue5/Article_A_H_McFadden.pdf.
Neimneh, Shadi. The Anti-Hero in Modernist Fiction: From Irony to Cultural Renewal. Vol. 46, no. 4, 2013, pp. 75–90. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1353/mos.2013.0036.
Rushdie, Salman. “‘Errata’: Or Unreliable Narration in Midnights Children.” Imaginary Homelands, Granta Books, 1991, pp. 22-25.
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