This blog was assigned by our respected Head of the Department, Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad Sir.
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It focuses on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, a novel that combines Western postmodern techniques with Indian oral storytelling traditions. The first part of the blog explains the narrative techniques used in the novel, such as framed stories, unreliable narration, magical realism, and parody. The second part gives a deconstructive reading of symbols, showing how objects like the perforated sheet, the silver spittoon, and the pickles carry complex layers of meaning. Overall, the blog highlights how Midnight’s Children tells not only the life story of Saleem Sinai but also reflects the larger story of India—fragmented, hybrid, and full of contradictions.
Narrative Techniques in Midnight’s Children: A Synthesis of Western Postmodernism and Indian Oral Traditions
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a masterful exploration of narrative form, blending Western postmodern literary techniques with traditional Indian storytelling methods. The novel’s structure is deeply influenced by devices such as framed narratives, unreliable narration, magical realism, and parody, all of which are rooted in both global and indigenous literary traditions. By examining these techniques, we can better understand how Rushdie constructs a narrative that reflects the fragmented, multi-layered nature of postcolonial Indian identity.
1. Framed Narratives: Chinese Boxes and Indian Oral Storytelling
The novel employs a "Chinese box" structure, a Western postmodern device where stories are nested within stories, creating multiple layers of narration. This technique, seen in works like Frankenstein and Heart of Darkness, allows for shifting perspectives and challenges the notion of a single, authoritative truth. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai’s autobiography is filled with digressions, alternate histories, and personal myths, emphasizing the subjectivity of memory and history.
Parallel to this, Rushdie draws from Indian oral storytelling traditions, particularly the Kathasaritsagara (an 11th-century Sanskrit text composed of interconnected tales) and Baital Pachisi (a collection of stories within a frame narrative, featuring King Vikram and a vampire spirit). These Indian forms thrive on cyclical, non-linear storytelling, where one tale triggers another, much like Saleem’s digressive and recursive narration. The "perforated sheet" motif, for instance, symbolizes fragmented perception, mirroring the layered storytelling of the Kathasaritsagara, where each tale reveals only partial truths.
2. Unreliable Narration: The Postmodern Narrator and the Indian Sutradhar
Saleem Sinai is a classic unreliable narrator, a hallmark of postmodern literature. His account is filled with contradictions, errors, and exaggerations, forcing readers to question the reliability of history itself. This technique aligns with postmodernism’s skepticism toward grand narratives and absolute truths.
In contrast, Indian epics like the Mahabharata and Ramayana also employ self-aware narrators. Ved Vyasa, the composer of the Mahabharata, and Valmiki, the author of the Ramayana, frame their stories as dialogues, acknowledging their constructed nature. Similarly, Saleem positions himself as a sutradhar (a traditional Indian storyteller or puppeteer), consciously shaping his tale while admitting its artifice. His declaration, "to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world," echoes the epic narrators’ role as both creators and distorters of their narratives.
3. Magical Realism: Myth as Political Allegory
Rushdie’s use of magical realism—where fantastical elements coexist with real-world events—is influenced by Western writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez. In Midnight’s Children, telepathic children, prophetic dreams, and supernatural events serve as metaphors for India’s tumultuous post-independence history.
However, this technique also has deep roots in Indian folklore and mythic traditions. The Panchatantra, a collection of animal fables, uses allegory to teach statecraft, much like Rushdie’s fantastical elements critique political realities. Similarly, Girish Karnad’s play Hayavadana (about a man with a horse’s head) blends myth and absurdism to explore identity—a theme central to Rushdie’s novel.
The "thirty jars" in Midnight’s Children, each holding a child’s fate, parallel the Panchatantra’s allegorical vessels, symbolizing fragmented destinies under authoritarian rule.
4. Parody and Counter-Historiography
Rushdie subverts official historical narratives through parody and episodic storytelling. The novel’s chapter titles—such as "The Perforated Sheet," "Snakes and Ladders," and "The Kolynos Kid"—mimic the structure of Indian oral serials while undermining colonial and nationalist mythmaking.
This technique mirrors the Mahabharata’s parvas (books), but Rushdie’s playful titles mock grand historical arcs, exposing how history is often constructed rather than absolute. By blending postmodern irony with Indian storytelling’s cyclical nature, Rushdie creates a narrative that is both a celebration and a critique of India’s postcolonial identity.
Conclusion: A Narrative of Hybridity
Midnight’s Children is a testament to narrative hybridity, merging:
- Postmodern fragmentation (unreliable narration, Chinese boxes)
- Indian orality (frame stories, the sutradhar’s role)
- Magical realism (myth as political allegory)
The novel’s structure—like the "empty jar" on Saleem’s shelf—invites readers to fill in the gaps, embracing multiplicity over singular truths. Rushdie’s genius lies in making the novel’s form its meaning: just as India’s history is a palimpsest of competing stories, Midnight’s Children demands that we question who controls the narrative—and who gets to rewrite it.
Deconstructive Reading of Symbols in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a text overflowing with allegory, symbolism, and narrative play. It is not only a story about Saleem Sinai, but also a story of India itself—fragmented, hybrid, and always in tension between memory and forgetting. A deconstructive reading of symbols allows us to see how Rushdie unsettles binary oppositions, destabilizes meaning, and foregrounds the contradictions that define postcolonial identity. In this blog, I will explore some of the central symbols—drawing from Derrida’s theory of pharmakon and Plato’s myth of writing—to unpack how Midnight’s Children resists closure and certainty.
Pharmakon: Remedy and Poison
In Phaedrus, Plato recounts the myth of Thoth, the Egyptian god who invented writing, offering it as a pharmakon—both remedy and poison. Socrates, however, condemns writing as corrosive to memory and truth. Jacques Derrida, in Plato’s Pharmacy (1969), seizes on this undecidable doubleness of pharmakon, showing how Western philosophy reduces ambiguity into binary oppositions such as speech/writing, remedy/poison, interior/exterior.
This concept is crucial for Rushdie’s novel. Midnight’s Children itself functions as a pharmakon: storytelling both preserves and distorts, heals and wounds, remembers and forgets. Saleem’s narration, fragmented and self-contradictory, enacts precisely what Derrida terms archi-writing—the recognition that speech itself is already a form of writing, always deferred and unstable.
The Perforated Sheet: Fragments of Vision
The perforated sheet through which Aadam Aziz first glimpses his wife-to-be epitomizes deconstruction. It reveals and conceals simultaneously, offering vision in fragments rather than wholeness. Saleem remarks that he is “condemned by a perforated sheet to a life of fragments,” and this metaphor expands to the entire novel’s narrative form.
Just as Aadam falls in love with his wife’s body in parts, never unified, Saleem recalls his own past in pieces. The perforated sheet is thus a symbol of partial knowledge, incomplete memory, and fractured identity. Jamila Singer later uses a similar veil, reducing her to a voice—suggesting how women, nation, and identity are mediated through absence as much as presence.
The Silver Spittoon: Memory and Amnesia
The silver spittoon, a wedding gift, emerges as one of the most layered symbols. Initially linked to the traditions of Old India, it becomes the vessel of Saleem’s memory. When struck on the head with it during the Indo-Pakistani war, Saleem loses his memory, yet instinctively clings to the spittoon as an anchor of identity.
Here again, deconstruction destabilizes meaning: the spittoon is both container of memory and agent of amnesia. It reminds us that memory itself is fragile, always on the brink of forgetting. The destruction of the spittoon during the Emergency parallels the erasure of democratic freedoms—identity itself smashed under authoritarian control.
Pickles: Preservation and Destruction
Saleem’s pickle factory literalizes the novel’s obsession with preservation. Like jars of chutney, Saleem preserves his story, chapter by chapter, labeling them for posterity. Pickles represent the power of narration to grant immortality, yet also the inevitability of decay.
Pickling thus becomes another pharmakon: it saves but also corrupts, freezes but also transforms. Saleem’s story, like India’s, is preserved in fragments, never offering a pure or unchanging truth.
Knees and Nose: Strength and Weakness
Ramram predicts the birth of “knees and nose”—Shiva and Saleem. Knees symbolize strength, aggression, and destruction; the nose, sensitivity, smell, and creation. When Aadam Aziz prays, his knees and nose both touch the ground, representing submission. Later, Farooq’s death reenacts this bowing gesture, now to death instead of God.
Shiva’s violent knees and Saleem’s magical nose embody the binary opposition of destruction/creation, faith/rebellion. Yet as deconstruction teaches, these binaries collapse into interdependence: Shiva’s brutality is necessary for historical change, while Saleem’s creativity cannot escape destruction.
Saleem and Shiva: Complementary Opposites
Saleem and Shiva—swapped at birth—symbolize the fractured identity of India. Saleem, allegorical India, carries the burden of memory; Shiva, embodiment of violence, represents destructive forgetfulness. Their binary opposition recalls the Chinese yin-yang: opposite forces bound together, incomplete without each other.
Saleem’s amnesia reflects the danger of a nation overwhelmed by its past, while Shiva’s indifference reveals the perils of forgetting history entirely. Both become political pawns during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, showing how personal identity collapses into national allegory.
Deconstructive Closure
Symbols in Midnight’s Children refuse stable interpretation. Each is undecidable, both remedy and poison, preservation and destruction, revelation and concealment. A deconstructive reading exposes Rushdie’s deliberate destabilization of meaning—mirroring the instability of postcolonial India itself.
Just as Derrida reads Plato against Plato, we must read Rushdie against Rushdie: Saleem’s story claims coherence but constantly unravels into fragments, contradictions, and alternative meanings. The novel’s symbols resist closure, inviting us to embrace uncertainty as the essence of truth.
Conclusion:
Reading Midnight’s Children through Derrida’s pharmakon demonstrates how Rushdie undermines binaries and shows identity, history, and memory to be fractured, undecidable, and hybrid. The perforated sheet, spittoon, pickles, knees and nose—all function as unstable signs that both preserve and undermine meaning. In the end, Rushdie’s novel does not give us a singular truth, but a constellation of fragments—India itself written as deconstruction.
References :
Barad, Dilip. “Dilip Barad | Teacher Blog: Midnight's Children.” Dilip Barad's Blog, 5 August 2021, https://blog.dilipbarad.com/2021/08/midnights-children.html.
“Deconstructive Reading of Symbols.” YouTube, uploaded by DoE-MKBU, 13 July 2021, https://youtu.be/KgJMf9BiI14
“Narrative Technique.” YouTube, uploaded by DoE-MKBU, 12 July 2021, https://youtu.be/opu-zd4JNbo
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