The Nation as Freak Show: Monstrosity and Biopolitics in Midnight’s Children

Abstract

While Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) is renowned for the allegorical parallel it draws between postcolonial Indian history and the fragmenting body of its narrator, it is rarely read as a disability narrative.¹ The central concerns of the novel relate to processes of nation-building and national representation: Rushdie provides both a celebration and a critique of the secular vision of independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (1947–64), summarized in the famous tenet ‘unity in diversity’. Whereas in Cracking India, Sidhwa documents the retreat of this ideal in the newly formed state of Pakistan, Rushdie articulates a profound sense of ambivalence regarding its continuing impact in independent India, where ‘Nehruvian rhetoric worked to transform the “problem” of cultural diversity into a “resource” for the developmental agenda of the new Indian state’ (Uberoi, 2003, p. 200). Under Nehru’s leadership, the nation-state was constructed according to ‘a model committed to protecting cultural and religious difference rather than imposing a uniform “Indianness”’ (Khilnani, 2003, p. 167). Midnight’s Children gives a joyful, exuberant account of the myriad emancipatory possibilities opened up, in theory, by such a tolerant, inclusive paradigm for national identity. Yet this is always tempered by the difficulties of achieving inclusivity, and the novel’s final chapters, set during the Indian Emergency of 1975–7 (and written very soon afterwards), reflect the definitive closing down of the vision.