Decolonizing the Bildungsroman: Nation and Self in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Abstract

Rushdie not merely chutnifies the English language in his novels, he also chutnifies
recognizable European literary forms and amalgamates them with indigenous
narratological traditions. In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie uses the Bildungsroman
form to chart the young man Saleem Sinai’s coming of age in a society trying to find
its identity after freeing itself from colonial shackles. Saleem’s life is inexorably
handcuffed to the history of India by virtue of the coincidence of his birth with that of
the birth of independent India on 15th August, 1947. Saleem with his magical powers
tries to embody all of India’s voices. However, Saleem fails in his quest for a coherent
identity and assimilate into society. Rushdie adopts the coming-of age structure of the
Bildungsroman in order to parody the genre’s dominant structure of search for stable
identity, assimilation into society and self-actualisation which is difficult in the context
of the hybridity of culture obtained in postcolonial societies like India. This paper
explores how Rushdie decolonizes the genre by subverting the realism and the
development framework of the Bildungsroman framework by taking recourse to magic
realism and the structure of the anti-bildungsroman. Rushdie’s chutnification of generic
forms symbolises the fragmented consciousness and identity of the postcolonial
subject.