Midnight's Orphans, or A Postcolonialism Worth Its Name

In 1997, Salman Rushdie celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence from British rule by coediting The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947-1997 with Elizabeth West. In the introduction to the anthology, Rushdie claimed that the most interesting literature of post-Independence India was in English. ¹ "The prose writing—both fiction and nonfiction—created in this period [the fifty years after independence] by Indian writers working in English," he wrote,

is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen "recognized" languages of India, the so-called "vernacular languages," during the same time; and, indeed, this new, and still burgeoning, "Indo-Anglian" literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books. The true Indian literature of the first postcolonial half-century has been made in the language the British left behind. (50)

It is readily apparent from Rushdie's introduction to the anthology that there are, in substance, two evaluatory parts to his argu-ment regarding contemporary Indian literature. One is Rushdie's high estimation of Indian literature in English, expanded on in an interview given around the time of the anthology's publication in which he claimed that because of literature written in English, "India has finally managed to break through into world literature, into the world's language, and to create this great province inside it" (1997,interview, 36). There can be little quarrel with the general thrust of this part of Rushdie's argument—that the contribution of Indian writers working in English (not the least of which are some of Rushdie's own works) has been of great value. It is the other part—Rushdie's devaluation of literature written in other Indian languages—that has proven controversial and met with criticism from various quarters. ²

There is indeed much to be said in defense of the aesthetic value of literature written in Indian languages other than English. However, in this essay, I am interested less in asserting this value contra Rushdie than in tracking what I consider certain other symptomatic theoretical and critical emphases of Rushdie's argument. For though I begin with Rushdie's provocative comments on contemporary Indian literature (and along the way will offer an assessment of some aspects of this literature), I intend to advance an argument about postcolonialism as a theoretical and literary critical project within the North American academy. ³ Rushdie is not in fact generally regarded as a critic or a theorist. Nevertheless, there is a certain justice in beginning with him. Commenting on Rushdie's "particular prominence," M. Keith Booker notes in the introduction to a recent anthology of critical essays on Rushdie that his work "has been particularly attractive" to postcolonial critics "for whom cultural hybridity is a crucial critical category" (1999, 2-3). Homi Bhabha, whose work I will discuss later, is one such critic identified by Booker.

There is a congruence, then, between Rushdie's fiction and certain strands of commentary on postcolonial literature, and it is this congruence that I rely on to legitimize my turn to Rushdie in a discussion of postcolonial criticism and theory. Recent critical overviews of postcolonialism have noted the great influence of these strands. Ania Loomba, for example, writes in Colonialism/Postcolonialism, "Postcolonial studies have been preoccupied with issues of hybridity, creolisation, mestizaje, in-betweenness, diasporas and liminality, with themobility and cross-overs of ideas and identities generated by colonialism" (1998, 173). And Leela Gandhi echoes this description when she writes toward the end of Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction,"Postcolonial literary theory, as we have seen, tends to privilege 'appropriation' over 'abrogation' and multicultural 'syncretism' over cultural 'essentialism'" (1998, 153). In this critical context, my turn to Rushdie allows me to demonstrate the widespread nature of the attitudes represented by these emphases, and also to show that the argument that follows is indeed not relevant only to...