Subaltern History in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
History is a crucial element in almost all of the Postcolonial and Postmodernist writing. The way in which history is approached in postcolonial writing is rather complex. Thus on the one hand, history is entirely denied as a concept by the postmodernists who disbelieve in the objective existence of a fixed reality and a fixed, orderly arrangement of things. Secondly, history is combated as one of the instruments used for dominance and colonization. The certainty with which the imperialists oppress the colonized peoples comes from the historical backdrop, which is the equivalent of a fixed and unchangeable account of facts and events. The notion of "subaltern history" then comes to replace or supplant the common views of the past as they were constructed by the dominant races or nations. An alternative view of the historical past is thus given by the members of culturally subordinated groups. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things are two celebrated Postcolonial Indian novels that have much in common. Thus, the most important and almost striking similarity is the view they share of history and their attempt to create alternate perspectives on reality. Both texts blend the political, mac
The God of Small Things shares in this criticism of history. The events taking place in India's history thus mingle with crucial aspects of Saleem's life at every step. Although innocent, he is condemned to death by the inspector Matthews, under the accusation of having killed the white nine year old girl, Sophie Mol. "(Rushdie, 565) Rushdie criticizes thus both the Indian, backward traditions (such as the episode of doctor Aziz and his future wife, who would not be seen naked even by the doctor and had to be peeped through a hole in a sheet) and the British, dominant politics which confine the fantastic powers of the midnight children. This is why a subaltern history needs to be constructed to escape the destructive power of the exclusivist, dominant view of things, as a part of a decolonization process. Things that had been out of bounds so far, obscured by history's blinkers. "(Rushdie, 566) Rushdie, as a postmodernist writer, is nostalgic for the time "before history", a paradoxical moment impossible to imagine in common terms. It is only very rarely that the individual manages to get a glimpse at the "small things", annihilating thus the historical perspective. Saleem Sinai, the main character in the novel is one of the one thousand miraculous children who were born on the day in which India finally gained its independence from Great Britain. "(Roy, 140) Velutha is an Untouchable, that is, he belongs to the lowest social category in the Indian system, one that is even outside the caste hierarchy. I, too, long on occasion to escape backwards, perhaps to the time when I, the apple of the universal eye, made a triumphant tour as a baby of the palaces of William Mcthwold - O insidious nostalgia for times of greater possibility, before history, like a street behind the General Post Office in Delhi, narrowed down to this final full point!. Both of these relationships are taboo and the forbidding force is history with its fixed laws: "History's fiends returned to claim them. We should have avoided it, I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity.
Common topics in this essay:
Office Delhi,
Saleem Sinai,
Postcolonial Postmodernist,
Postcolonial Indian,
Mol Furthermore,
Velutha Untouchable,
Rushdie Roy,
Rahel Estha,
William Mcthwold,
Love Laws,
midnight's children,
connection individual,
magical realism,
individual lives,
historical perspective,
reality magical realism,
reality magical,
subaltern history,
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