Identity in Salman Rushdie

             Examine the construction of identity in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.
             Colonialism is the consolidation of imperial power through the attempt to
             govern lands that are now occupied. Postcolonial literature sets out to oppose the
             colonialist perspective. They develop a perspective that retrieves states of marginality
             and is concerned with man's quest for his identity. Postcolonial theories relate the
             quest of their individual hero or heroines to the past of their lives.
             Salman Rushdie born in an Indian Muslim family is a postcolonial writer. After
             graduating Rushdie returned home to Pakistan where his parents had moved, whilst
             there he felt a sense of alienation having been so long away from his cultural roots
             that he decided to return to England. This is a feeling that many of the postcolonial
             writers identify with. Many of these writers like Salman Rushdie, Sunetra Gupta and
             Rukhsana Ahmed are caught in between two cultures that in many cases are very
             contrasting. It is very difficult for these writers to adapt to both cultures and because
             of his they find it difficult to construct their identity. This is a problem that the
             narrator Saleem Sinai faces in Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children.
             The search for a country with secular ideals is one of the themes of Midnight's
             Children. Rushdie makes an attempt to explore some of the darkness of that
             experience by relating the family history of Saleem to the history of India's freedom
             struggle. Saleem's search for identity parallels to and is directly connected with the
             history of a nation that is constructing itself. Saleem was born at the hour that ends the
             British Raj, sustains the identities of a narrator and becomes the consciousness of the
             whole country. Saleem assumes many identities he is a distinctive mixture of the
             creation of Indian culture and that of Islamic tradi...

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