Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature

3. Constituting the Liberal Subject of Rights: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

79 q Chapter Three Constituting the Liberal Subject of Rights Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children This book’s literary case studies begin with Salman Rushdie,a writer who has personally lived out the nexus between free speech and human rights. Catapulted into the international limelight when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in response to The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie and his career might seem to offer a parable for freedom of expression .1 However,this chapter investigates not the real-world human rights controversy spawned by The SatanicVerses but rather Midnight’s Children (1981), a novel that,although it garnered widespread literary acclaim,did not yet make Rushdie a global celebrity. Awarded the 1981 Booker Prize and then in 1993 named the “Booker of Bookers,” Midnight’s Children is widely understood to exemplify the theoretical preoccupations of postcolonial studies—not only manifesting high postmodernism’s aesthetic difficulty, experimentation, and play but also verifying the poststructuralist emphasis on writing and textuality. Yet this chapter reads Midnight’s Children against those grains to contemplate how it adjudicates the yield of liberalism as a theory of politics and selfhood, probing that broad framework’s ability to negotiate the many challenges that have confronted both the incorporation of the postcolonial nation-state and the self-constitution of the liberal individual—a construct that,I have argued, lends crucial explanatory authority to human rights. Midnight’s Children conducts an epic sweep of the history of the Indian subcontinent over much of the twentieth century, above all recounting the first 80 CHAPTER THREE thirty years following postcolonial independence. As a saga of that tumultuous era, the novel has frequently been interpreted as a meditation on the “pitfalls of national consciousness,” an approach that treats the misadventures of its first-person narrator and protagonist Saleem Sinai,born on the precise instant of independence, as an analogue for the fledging nations of India and, to a degree, Pakistan.2 Indeed, Midnight’s Children portrays both the trials of that strife-ridden transition and the unique texture of Indian nationalism;however, in doing so,it also mines the many values and expectations through which the newly sovereign Indian nation sought to define its legal and political culture. While Saleem’s birth inaugurates postcoloniality, it simultaneously ushers in a particular vision of both national independence and individual liberty, and Midnight’s Children charts the hazards as well as the promise of those conjoined bequests. Through his autobiographical narrative,Saleem endeavors to forge a cohesive identity that will equally capture the national self-image and ordain his own individuality, but he encounters a number of obstacles to those dual crucibles in self-determination, in particular, as his mandate to autonomously self-fashion conflicts with core ambitions of a liberal democracy. The postwar era imagined by Midnight’s Children occasioned more than the beginnings of decolonization: it also installed a new model and discourse of international governance—namely, human rights. While these two developments were neither synonymous nor seen to be innately politically or intellectually intertwined, in their proximity they jointly spawned a particular postwar political climate founded on a complimentary set of liberal commitments that have increasingly met with codification in both international and domestic law.3 The official departure of the British from India occurred on August 14–15, 1947, a mere fifteen months and odd days before the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the United Nations General Assembly. Moreover, the Indian Constitution—ratified on November 26, 1949, and effective as of January 26, 1950—contains its own statement of rights. That charter of “fundamental rights” continues to serve as a prominent insignia of Indian nationalism, placing a belief in rights at the heart of India’s legal and political culture. As a figure for the Indian nation, Saleem, too, experiments with the language of rights in devising his own identity, drawing on rights and related liberal vocabularies of selfhood to craft his emergent subjectivity. Yet while his odyssey of subject formation might appear to corroborate the descriptive authority of liberalism and its broad philosophical architecture, Midnight’s Children ultimately indexes the contradictions and foreclosures that haunt rights logic,along with correlative assumptions about democracy,the rule of law,secularism,and the democratic public sphere. CONSTITUTING THE LIBERAL SUBJECT OF RIGHTS 81 As I have shown, liberal topographies of the human impose the burden of reasoned self-fashioning on the individual, and...