tion.
"A major feature of post colonial literature is the concern with place and
displacement" . This is evident in Midnight's Children. In Midnight's Children
Rushdie tells the story of India's independence and Pakistan's creation, a union of two
worlds, pre and post colonial India and how at the stroke of midnight the Indians
began their lives with great hopes. Midnight's Children is Rushdie's portrayal of the
idea of history as displaced and suggests that Saleem is also displaced. Switched at
birth Saleem is actually a Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims. Saleem's life and
his search for true identity is allegorical to India's search for self through the first
years of independence, the partition of India and Pakistan to the rise of Indira Gandhi
and war. "Rushdie set the book firmly in history so that the book was rooted in this
worldly and the contemporary. The purpose of the novel was to enable people to see
the world more intensely. The point of view of the novel is that of a secular man" .
History is examined not as a narrative of causes and effects but as the product of an
individual prejudiced imagination of the narrator, Saleem who believes that he is
personally "hand cuffed to history" and throughout the novel there is the notion of
him being personally responsible for the entire course of Indian history since
independence. Edward Said suggests that Salman Rushdie has attempted to write a
history of his time through the imaginative form of fiction. According to Saleem this
has to be done because it is a novelists desire to pickle and "chutnify" history and
preserve it for posterity, "to pickle is to give immortality" . Rushdie has tried to
restore and preserve the history of his time by offering his version of it. By preserving
history Saleem is able to preserve hi...