Loving in Parts: Reading Fragmented National Imaginary and Diasporic Schizophrenia in Rushdie's Midnight’s Children and Shame

Abstract

India has been conceived as an ‘imaginary homeland’ to diasporic writers, who exist at the fringes of national existence because of their self-exiled status. This paper is devoted to the fragmented vision of the many Indias that emerge after battling conflicts of interest and imagination in the writings of one of the most celebrated diasporic authors of our times—Salman Rushdie. What I propose in this academic endeavour is that the imaginary homeland created by Rushdie is far from the homogenous organic entity of the modern nation state. On the contrary, Rushdie’s exiled imagination seeks to reassemble the jigsaw of the nation in a somewhat erratic manner whereby its holistic modalities stand suitably problematised. The standard diasporic nostalgia that critics prescribe as the staple post-colonial diet begets a perverse twist in the very conception of the idea of the ‘country’, since the schemata of that national imaginary stands always already shattered in the discourses that are spun out of a migrant mind. His experiences, therefore, both as an insider and an outsider, remain imperative in the (de)construction of an entire nation’s fate. In Midnight’s Children and Shame, he unpacks the lethal forces of history that have navigated this prehistoric landscape of loss, the way the subcontinent has survived manhandling for centuries and has consequently emerged battle-weary and scarred. The subsequent fragmentation of the topographical areas of the nation, following each war has symbolised, over the new century, the significant dismantling of the nature of the nation state, the fissures in its post-colonial frame, and the deep psychological crisis in the post-national psyche. The paper is therefore an endeavour to undertake an analysis of a diasporic author’s imaginarium of his own splintered existence in tandem with his mother nation, and an effort to comprehend the quasihistorical and mythical treatment of the theme of the nationhood itself.