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Abstract
Keywords
Introduction: The Dialogic Turn in Rushdie’s Narrative
Rushdie’s Dialogic Rewriting of Epic and Myth
Saleem Sinai as the Parodic Scheherazade
Epic Allusion, Parody, and the Mahabharata
Heteroglossia and Linguistic Plurality as National Allegory
The Carnivalesque: Laughter Against Power and Official Histories
Temporal Dialogism and the Blending of Historical Modes
The Dialogic Nation and the Crisis of Authorship
Political Implications of Intertextual Parody
Conclusion: Dialogism as Cultural Survival
References
Name:- Rutvi Pal
Batch :- M.A. Sem 2 (2024-2026)
Enrollment Number :- 5108240025
E-mail Address :-rutvipal4@gmail.com
Roll Number :- 23
Topic : Intertextuality and Parody: Rushdie’s Dialogic Engagement with Indian and Western Narrative Traditions — A Comparative Reading of Midnight’s Children, The Mahabharata, and The Arabian Nights in Light of Bakhtin’s Dialogism
Paper & subject code :- 202: Indian English Literature – Post-Independence - 22407
Submitted to :- Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar
Date of Submission :- 7 November 2025
This paper explores Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) as a profound act of intertextuality and parody that re-engages both Indian mythic traditions—notably The Mahabharata—and Western-oriental storytelling models, particularly The Arabian Nights. Framed through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism, heteroglossia, and the carnivalesque, the study argues that Rushdie’s novel re-voices and subverts epic and tale traditions to construct a polyphonic postcolonial historiography. Rather than replicating the unity and teleology of classical epics, Rushdie transforms them into a fragmented, multi-vocal national allegory, where myth, memory, and history collide. The narrator Saleem Sinai, both a storyteller and a self-parodying Scheherazade, redefines storytelling as survival, resistance, and identity formation. The novel’s linguistic plurality and narrative digressions embody Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, turning the text into a carnival of competing discourses—political, mythic, bureaucratic, and colloquial—mirroring the multiplicity of modern India. Through parodic re-writing of The Mahabharata’s heroic unity and The Arabian Nights’s frame-tale enchantment, Midnight’s Children collapses the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, history and fantasy, author and character. The paper contends that Rushdie’s dialogic strategy dismantles the monologic authority of the epic voice, replacing it with a postcolonial polyphony where truth becomes plural, history becomes narrative, and identity becomes negotiation. By using Bakhtinian dialogism as both method and metaphor, the novel asserts that cultural survival in a post-colonial world depends not on silence or imitation but on conversation, parody, and reinvention. Thus, Midnight’s Children stands as both homage and critique—a literary “meeting ground” where Indian epics, Western tales, and postcolonial realities coexist in perpetual dialogue.
Salman Rushdie; Midnight’s Children; Intertextuality; Parody; Dialogism; Bakhtin; The Mahabharata; The Arabian Nights; Heteroglossia; Carnivalesque; Postcolonial Narrative; Epic Parody; Polyphony; Temporal Disjunction; Nation as Text.
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) stands as a watershed in postcolonial fiction—a novel that redefines both the language and logic of storytelling in English. Emerging at the juncture of decolonization and literary experimentation, it blends myth, history, and magic into a single narrative fabric that resists any singular interpretation. The novel’s very structure reflects what Mikhail Bakhtin terms dialogism—a principle that privileges multiplicity over unity, conversation over command, and heterogeneity over hierarchy.In the modernist tradition, narrative often sought coherence or psychological depth; Rushdie’s novel, by contrast, embraces fragmentation and contradiction as forms of truth-telling in a plural society. His protagonist, Saleem Sinai, embodies the fractured identity of postcolonial India—a nation and a self “handcuffed to history,” as Rushdie writes. Yet this self is not isolated; it speaks with and through other voices: the voices of mythic heroes, colonial masters, bureaucratic officials, and familial ancestors. Each voice jostles for authority within a vast linguistic carnival, turning the novel into a textual embodiment of India’s polyphonic social and cultural reality. At the heart of this narrative lies intertextuality—a deliberate re-engagement with older narrative traditions, both Eastern and Western. The Mahabharata offers a model of epic temporality, ethical complexity, and divine intervention; The Arabian Nights provides an infinite frame of storytelling that defers closure and keeps narrative alive through repetition and reinvention. Rushdie’s genius lies in his dialogic reactivation of these traditions: he neither imitates nor rejects them but makes them speak to each other within the postcolonial moment.Through parody, Rushdie performs a critical homage. He transforms the gravitas of epic into irony, the authority of scripture into self-reflexivity, and the sanctity of myth into political metaphor. In doing so, he illustrates Bakhtin’s claim that “truth is not born nor found inside the head of an individual; it is born between people collectively searching for truth.” The dialogue between texts—the epic and the novel, the East and the West, the sacred and the secular—becomes the site of a new cultural negotiation.This introduction thus sets the premise of the paper: to analyze Midnight’s Children as a dialogic text, where Rushdie’s use of intertextuality and parody engages Indian and Western narrative traditions in an act of cultural redefinition. The following sections unfold how the novel mobilizes the Mahabharata’s epic form and the Arabian Nights’ narrative pattern, only to parody and pluralize them, embodying Bakhtin’s vision of literature as a polyphonic space—a space where no voice can claim final authority.
In Midnight’s Children (1981), Salman Rushdie mobilises the narrative scale and mythic grandeur of the Indian epic tradition (notably the Mahabharata) as well as the wonder-story architecture of the Arabian Nights, but he does so in a profoundly dialogic, critical mode. Where the Mahabharata traditionally delivers a unified moral vision, a cosmic struggle of dharma and fate, Rushdie instead presents a sprawling national allegory whose multiplicity of voices refuses closure. His narrator, Saleem Sinai, begins with the mythic posturing—“I am the sum total of everything that went before me”—only to devolve into digressions, contradictions and ironic self-reflections that subvert the epic. Meanwhile, the structure of storytelling evokes the Arabian Nights’ embedded tales, yet Saleem’s account is not soothing or reassuring: the listener (Padma) questions him, the “once upon a time” framing becomes interrogated, and the larger nation-story becomes unstable. This interplay of mythic allusion and ironic revision registers a dialogic strategy: Rushdie allows the voices of history, myth, popular culture and personal memory to speak to and contest one another. As one critic notes, the novel’s “intertextual references … reflect the cultural hybridity inherent in post-colonial societies.” In effect, Rushdie invests the epic and tale-forms with new potential: not to unify the nation under a grand narrative, but to open it up as a contested field of storytelling.
The Arabian Nights traditionally frames a sequence of tales told by Scheherazade to her husband, the Sultan, embedded within nested narratives that offer moral, fantastical and often orientalised spectacles. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem assumes the role of storyteller to Padma—but this role is inverted and parodic. Where Scheherazade’s tales consolidate the storyteller’s power, safeguard her life and reinforce the majesty of the sovereign, Saleem’s narration turns into a performance of survival, memory-work and national myth-making. He is both heroic and ridiculous: his oversized nose, fluctuating fortunes, telepathic powers, and erratic shifts in voice make him comedic, pathetic and majestic simultaneously. The structural mirror is apparent: Saleem’s life = India’s life; his digressions = the nation’s digressions; the midnight birth = mythic origin of the nation. But while Scheherazade’s storytelling affirms order, Saleem’s undoes it. He addresses Padma but also the reader, he confesses to misremembering and rewriting, he mocks his own grandiosity—thus turning the Arabian Nights structure into a site of free-floating contestation. According to an article analysing Rushdie’s intertextuality, “the birth of the 1001 midnight’s children” echoes the “1001 nights” theme. Moreover, by making his narrator self-aware, fallible and comic, Rushdie invites the reader to witness the transactional nature of storytelling, rather than blindly accept an enchanting illusion. In Bakhtinian terms, the narrator is no longer sovereign voice but one voice among many, participating in a carnival of narration. Thus the Arabian Nights allusion is not simply decorative—it is reworked as spectacle, critique, and metafictional commentary.
The influence of the Mahabharata on Midnight’s Children is multifaceted: the epic’s concern with kinship, fate, war, national identity, pilgrimage and cosmic scale all resonate within Rushdie’s text. Saleem’s family saga—overlapping generations, secret lineages, rivalries, exile and return—mirrors the dynastic feuds of the Pandavas and Kauravas. His birth at the pivotal moment of India’s independence evokes epic origin-myth. Yet rather than affirming epic moral structure, Rushdie parodies it. The “Midnight’s Children Conference” of children with special powers clearly maps to epic councils of gods or heroes—but rather than achieving collective mission, the conference collapses into infighting and absurdity. Rushdie highlights the failure of heroic teleology in post-colonial India. The solemn spiritual tone of the epic is replaced by bodily grotesque (Saleem’s nose, his bodily decomposition) and farce. In this way, Rushdie enacts what might be called the “decrowning” of the heroic mode: another voice speaks, one that laughs at authority and refuses epic closure. As scholar C. Hawes argues, Rushdie’s allusions “... range across high culture and popular culture, but they also operate as playful re-visionings of the epic tradition.” In terms of Bakhtinian parody, Rushdie does not mock the epic off-hand, but engages it dialogically: he acknowledges its weight, then permits other voices to contest its legitimacy. The result is an “epic of failure”—the grand scale remains, but the moral architecture is missing, replaced by the ironic and the plural.
One of Bakhtin’s key terms is heteroglossia: the presence within a single text of multiple social languages (dialect, formal prose, bureaucratic speech, popular speech, mythic register). In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie’s language is a microcosm of India’s linguistic multiplicity. English is “Indianised” with local idioms, Hindi/Urdu words, mythic allusions, slang, and high-brow rhetoric. The narration frequently shifts: Saleem may recount a bureaucratic speech of Nehru’s India, then dissolve into street conversation, mythic invocation, mythic digression, or magical realist imagery. This collage of registers does more than localise the narrator—it enacts the plurality of post-colonial India. The monologic voice of colonial English or nationalist propaganda is fragmented, subverted, and mixed with voices of the margin. One recent study elaborates: “Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children brings alive India’s past through magical realism and a chaotic, non-linear narrative … by blending magic, myth, and multilingualism.” Through heteroglossia, Rushdie disrupts the authoritative singular voice of epic or national narrative and instead allows for an ensemble of voices, all competing, overlapping, speaking to and against each other. In Bakhtin’s view, the novel thus becomes polyphonic—a space where voices are equal, not ranked; where meaning is negotiated rather than dictated. In this sense, Midnight’s Children becomes an allegory of the nation as text: many voices, many languages, many truths.
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Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque refers to the subversion of hierarchical structures through laughter, parody, grotesque imagery and bodily humour. In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie employs this carnivalesque impulse to de-authorize official national narratives, heroic myths, nationalist historiography and colonial legacy. Politicians, state ceremonies, patriotic parades are rendered as absurd, theatrical spectacles. Saleem’s bodily deformities (his nose, his bulging temples, his telepathic powers), his fall from power, his suffering, are all part of this grotesque carnival of history. By bringing the ‘high’ (state, national myth) into contact with the ‘low’ (bodily humour, street scenes, mythic fantasy), Rushdie enacts a dialogic critique of power: no voice is safe from laughter or inversion. This approach resonates with the notion that parody is not merely mockery but an epistemic tool: it disrupts domination of official discourse and opens space for counter-voices. In an open-access article, researchers highlight how Rushdie’s “transaction between fact and fiction … questions the boundaries of history and fiction” and thereby participates in a subversive narrative strategy. The result is that the epic subject (national hero, founding father, unified narrative) is dethroned, and the novel becomes a carnival of stories, claims and counterclaims. Through laughter and excess, Rushdie achieves a radical re-vision of national identity and historical memory.
Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope—the intrinsic connection of spatial and temporal relationships in narrative—can be profitably applied to Midnight’s Children. The Mahabharata’s sacred, cyclical time, the Arabian Nights’ timeless storytelling and the modern nation-state’s linear historical time all converge in Rushdie’s text. Saleem’s birth coincides with India’s independence; his life spans Partition, Republic Day, Emergency, and beyond. Mythic episodes (telepathy, magical conferences, bodily disintegration) overlap with historical events (Nehru’s broadcast, Indira’s Emergency, the India-Pakistan context). This blend disrupts the linear teleology of national historiography: myth intrudes upon history, the present haunts the past, time loops back on itself. One study observes that Rushdie’s narrative “blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy” and thus “underscores the fragmented nature of post-colonial identities.” In Bakhtin’s terms, the novel opens up a dialogic temporality: instead of a single “national time,” multiple temporal registers speak to one another. The epic time of myth debates with the modern time of politics; the oral time of storytelling collides with the printed time of history books. The outcome is a narrative that refuses to be finalised—a crucial post-colonial move, for it admits that national narration is always incomplete, always in negotiation.
Rushdie not only multiplies voices in his novel but also collapses the notion of singular authorship. Saleem repeatedly undermines his own narrator-authority: he apologises, digresses, admits falsifications, addresses the reader, shifts registers. The “authoritative word” of the epic bard or the historian is replaced by a richly contested narrative field. This is classic Bakhtinian polyphony: characters and listeners, narrator and reader, myth and documentary all speak. The text’s self-aware nods to its own construction (e.g., Saleem’s commentary on his nose, his telepathy, his bodily decay) remind us of the novel as artificial construct, not transparent window to truth. In this sense, Midnight’s Children becomes an experiment in authorship: the authorial voice is dispersed, decentralised. In so doing, Rushdie reflects the post-colonial condition: identity, history, memory are constructed, fluid, multiple. The nation itself is not a monolith but a thousand Conversations. As one article puts it, “intertextuality in Midnight’s Children … creates a richly layered and multifaceted narrative” by weaving historical, literary, cultural, religious and self-referential threads. Thus dialogism becomes the form of the nation, prose becomes national prose, and reading becomes act of negotiation, not passive reception.
All these formal strategies—intertextual rewriting of myth/epic, heteroglossia, parody, temporal blending—have strong political implications. Rushdie’s engagement with formative cultural texts (Mahabharata, Arabian Nights) is not nostalgic revival but critical interrogation: he asks what these texts mean in post-Independent India, who gets to tell the story, whose voices are silenced, which myths support which ideologies. By refusing to treat national origin as given and heroic, Rushdie’s parodic epic implies that the nation is built on multiple inheritances and conflicting memories, not on a single founding myth. This resonates with the post-colonial critique of nationalist historiography which privileges certain voices at the expense of others. Parody here is method, not mere style: it de-naturalises the official story and opens space for alternative narratives (minorities, regional identities, suppressed histories). Through his intertextual architecture, Rushdie invites the reader to question not only the content of national stories, but the very forms by which they are told. The result is a literature of dissent, a literature of multiplicity—and a rewriting of the nation as conversation rather than monument.
In sum, Midnight’s Children is more than a novel—it is a dialogic archive, a palimpsest of myth, history, story, language and identity. By reworking the epic grandeur of the Mahabharata and the narrative frame of the Arabian Nights, Rushdie does not simply borrow tradition—he enters into conversation with it. With Bakhtin’s theoretical lens, we see how the monologic voice of authority is contested by heteroglossic registers, how the epic’s moral closure is replaced by parody and carnivalesque laughter, how linear historiography is collapsed into overlapping temporalities. The novel thus becomes emblematic of the post-colonial condition: the past is never final; the nation is never finished; meaning is always being negotiated. In this sense, Rushdie does not reject tradition; he repurposes it, dialogues with it, and opens it to new voices. Midnight’s Children becomes not a testament but a forum—a living, breathing conversation in which the nation, story, and reader all participate.
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