Caught in a Strange Middle Ground: Contesting History in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Diaspora 1:2 1991 Caught in a Strange Middle Ground: Contesting History in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children David Lipscomb Trinity School, New York City So if I am to speak for Indian writers in England I would say this, paraphrasing G. V. Desani's H. Hatterr: the migrations of the 1950s and 1960s happened. "We are. We are here."And we are not willing to be excluded from any part of our heritage: which heritage includes . . . the right ofany member ofthis post-diaspora community to draw on its roots for its art, just as the world's community of displaced writers has always done. Salman Rushdie, "Imaginary Homelands" Salman Rushdie wrote these words in 1982, and the defensive tone makes clear that his position as an "Indian" writer was less than secure long before the "Rushdie Affair" and the infamous fatwa1 complicated the issue of his location. An Indian Muslim, born in Bombay, Rushdie has made his home in England since he left India for Rugby School at the age offourteen. His parents gave him a third homeland when they moved to Pakistan while he was at Rugby. Becoming a British citizen, earning a Cambridge degree, marrying a British woman, and later marrying an American have further complicated his expatriate status. That his right to draw on his Indian roots is not universally appreciated is made clear by looking at a few of the names his critics have recently called him, such as "a selfhating Indo-Anglian,"2 or "the overrated Eurasian writer,"3 or "a hireling of Indian origin,"4 or even "the totally assimilated and assimilable , Westernized, British-educated Asian intellectual" (Jussawalla 114). Rushdie, who in no way considers himself "self-hating" or deracinated , has, in fact, continually chosen to celebrate the very position of cultural hybridity and impurity that others now use against him. Insults are not the only things a migrant's position can produce: "Our identity [that of the Indian writer in England] is at once partial and plural. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools . . . but however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not infertile territory for a writer to occupy" ("Imaginary Homelands" 18). One ofthe products Diaspora 1:2 1991 of this territory, Rushdie believes, is a doubt that enables the migrant writer to resist the control of those who speak the discourses of cultural purity and absolute "truth." Rushdie sees this doubt springing not only from the postdiasporan territory of an Indian writer in England, but also from the position of dislocation common to all migrants. His most complete articulation of what this doubt is and how it is produced is found in his article on Gunter Grass, a writer who, as Rushdie says, "grew up ... in a house and a milieu in which the Nazi view of the world was treated quite simply as objective reality" ("On Gunter" 182). Rushdie considers Grass a migrant because his travel "across the frontiers of history" to a post-Nazi view of reality is comparable to a migrant's dislocation from place, language, and social conventions. This is what the triple disruption of reality teaches migrants: that reality is an artefact, that it does not exist until it is made, and that, like any other artefact, it can be made well or badly, and that it can also, of course, be unmade. What Grass learned on his journey across the frontiers of history was Doubt. Now he distrusts all those who claim to possess absolute forms of knowledge; he suspects all total explanations, all systems of thought which purport to be complete. ("On Gunter" 183-84) The migrant's position lacks the comforts of certitude and settlement , but it is fertile territory upon which the writer can remake reality. And unmake it. As I hope to show in this essay, unmaking a discourse that claims absolute forms of knowledge, the discourse of western historiography, is a central project of Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a novel that draws frequently on Indian roots. And as Rushdie expands the definition of a migrant to include Gunter Grass, I would like to expand...