Colonialism In Midnight's Children

DIASPORIC PERSPECTIVE ON SALMAN RUSHDIE’S MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN

Veronika Mondal,

Research Scholar, Department of English

Sri Satya Sai University of Technology and Medical sciences

Sehore,Madhya Pradesh.

Midnight 's Children is a fictional historical account of 20th century India. It is a novel about Indian independence, the partition and its aftermath. In the present paper an attempt has been made to study this fictional history of India in the light of the writing of diaspora. This paper tries to highlight the novel through diasporic perspective .As this novel deals with the Indian freedom movement, the unequal power relationship between the colonizers and colonized is clearly evident in it. This paper pays attention to this unequal power

The construction of a specifically national consciousness is dependent upon important cultural activities. In colonialism the colonizing powers always try to colonize the mind, by asserting the superiority of their own culture and the inferiority of those of the natives. In colonialism a particular world view is taught as the best and the most appropriate. They project their own cultural tradition as true and superior and reject the native cultural traditions as false and inferior. The colonizers often assume that the colonized peoples had no meaningful culture prior to the arrival of the colonizers. In the post-colonial world, the cultural inheritance of the colonized people is given back its value. The postcolonial writers, at first, refused to believe that the colonized had no meaningful culture prior to the arrival of the colonizers. They give value to their own cultural tradition and cherish all that colonialism dismisses as evidence of barbarism. National consciousness and national cultures are inseparable from each other and anti-colonial resistance cannot succeed without them. Writers, artists and intellectuals play a vital role in imagining the nation and in this way they participate centrally in resisting colonialism. A detailed analysis of the novel Midnight 's Children shows that in many respects it is concerned with the issues and purposes which are central to diasporic literature.It can be said that Midnight 's Children recreates Rushdie’s sense of an ‘India of the mind’ through the novelistic conventions established by Rushdie for postcolonial novels written by immigrant writers. Rushdie’s Midnight 's Children is a novel about the enabling power of hybridity which is an important issue of diasporic