Gandhian Communalism and the Midnight Children's Conference

Gandhian Communalism and the Midnight Children's Conference

Strand, Eric.

ELH, Volume 72, Number 4, Winter 2005, pp. 975-1016 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/elh.2005.0038

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975Eric StrandELH 72 (2005) 975–1016 © 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

GANDHIAN COMMUNALISM AND THEMIDNIGHT CHILDREN’S CONFERENCE

BY ERIC STRAND

[W]e may be heading towards a world in which there will be no realalternative to the liberal-capitalist social model (except, perhaps, thetheocratic, foundationalist model of Islam). In this situation, liberalcapitalism or democracy or the free world will require novelists’ mostrigorous attention, will require reimagining and questioning anddoubting as never before. “Our antagonist is our helper,” saidEdmund Burke, and if democracy no longer has communism to helpit clarify, by opposition, its own ideals, then perhaps it will have tohave literature as an adversary instead.

—Salman Rushdie, “Is Nothing Sacred?”

Many Rushdie scholars call Midnight’s Children the politicalreawakening of Indian English fiction. The story begins with thegestation of the Indian English novel during the movement forindependence, when “there was an urgency to foreground the idea ofa composite nation.”1 After 1947 comes a period of atrophy, as thenation-building that was the source of the genre’s power nowbecomes an “ideological straitjacket.”2 According to Gayatri Spivak,“reportorial realist writers” depicted the “miniaturised world of anostalgia,” as political independence set them “adrift, away from thecurrent from which the post-colonial monstrous would emerge.”3 InBishnupriya Ghosh’s view, novelists made “essentializing and homog-enizing gestures” in an alignment with a statist project, “the Nehruvianvision of a modern and progressive India when there was a dire needto establish common national registers and field[s] of communica-tion.”4 Then Midnight’s Children explodes over Bombay in 1981, itsEmergency-induced gloom counterbalanced by an invigorating cul-tural eclecticism and spirit of political critique. For MeenakshiMukherjee, the novel’s vision of an “inclusive and tolerant” polityclarifies a set of public ideals for a socially diverse nation, whileMichael Gorra claims that “no one else has so fully used [English] toprobe the nature of [Indian] national identity or to define a model for

Angelia Fell

new muse

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the postcolonial self.”5 Midnight’s Children inaugurates a renaissancefor Indian English fiction, a development that is codified by Rushdie’sown coedited anthology of post-1947 writing.6

My essay argues for an inversion of this narrative: Midnight’sChildren can be seen as a foreclosure of possibilities, erasing alterna-tive models of the Indian nation. Although Saleem Sinai character-izes his writing as a restorative for an “amnesiac nation,” Midnight’sChildren has itself created a kind of literary-political amnesia, eitherblotting out the work of earlier writers or encouraging critics to readtheir work in the light of developments after 1981.7 For example,although Josna Rege chides that “few critics of whatever theoreticalbent or political stripe, especially those in the US-UK, have placedMidnight’s Children in its Indian literary context,” in her ownplacement of Midnight’s Children in an Indian literary context shefocuses mainly on what happened after its publication (on the fictionproduced by the so-called Rushdie’s Children); a potential contrastbetween Midnight’s Children and earlier novels goes unexplored.8 Iwill take a brief look at political novels written between 1947 and1981 to tell a story different from the one in the above paragraph:that Indian English writers treated pan-Indian themes does not meanthat they necessarily supported a nationalist project of industrialmodernization, and if they did support elements of such a project,this new society need not be an individualistic bourgeois civilization.Writers like R. K. Narayan, Nayantara Sahgal, Bhabani Bhattacharya,and Arun Joshi were far from being Nehruvian technocrats, as theyall explored aspects of Mohandas Karamchand (“Mahatma”) Gandhi’scritique of modernity in their novels: Narayan depicting a communalmorality that involves a politics of local engagement, and Sahgal,Bhattacharya, and Joshi attempting to locate the possibility ofsatyagraha (political action based on love and suffering instead offorce and coercion) in the post-1947 era of national independence.Neither advocates of modernization nor reactionary antimodernists,these writers largely shared Gandhi’s position of “critical traditional-ism,” opposing liberal capitalism in an attempt to find an alternativeset of core values for the nation.9

Rushdie, by contrast, gives almost unqualified support for aregenerated, industrialized India, dispensing with a Gandhian cri-tique of bourgeois materialism. Hence, Midnight’s Children is not assubversive of the Western liberal tradition as it is usually made out tobe: its idealistic vision of Indian political selfhood, centered aroundthe quasi-mythical midnight’s children, grows precisely out of liberal

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capitalism. However, Rushdie’s goal is not to simply expose Saleem’scomplicity with an exploitative neocolonial elite, as in TimothyBrennan’s influential reading.10 For all his use of magical-realisttechnique, Rushdie does not bury the ideal of Western rationalindividualism but rather memorializes it; as Brian May suggests,instead of celebrating “modernity’s negation” (as many postcolonialcritics claim), he indulges in a “nostalgia . . . for what was, but wasn’tever, [Third World peoples’] own . . . [a]n openness to discrepantpossibility, even when it is put forth by the enemy.”11 My argument isthat Rushdie does exactly the same thing on a social as well as anindividual level, memorializing the ideal of what I call, drawing onJürgen Habermas, a “postcolonial public sphere” in which Indians ofdiverse classes and castes debate with each other as equals.12 TheMidnight Children’s Conference (MCC) is based on Saleem’s ideathat class differences can be transcended: that through appeals torationality and a common humanity, Indian citizens can debate issuesof the common good in a privileged public space. Undergirded as it isby a commercial economy, this new public ideal displaces theGandhian critique of Western modernity.

No sooner does Saleem establish this forum for public debate,however, than a structural transformation of the Indian public spherebegins. Committed to an abstract ideal of unity and consensus,Saleem resists the kind of practical group action characteristic ofsatyagraha. As a result, the public sphere becomes mere dogmaamidst the turbulence of postcolonial Indian society, as Saleem findsthat he must defend his socioeconomic privilege by assuming au-thoritarian control. The democratic ideal of the public sphere turnsout to be an untenable one, linked as it is to an ideology of capitalistindividualism that Rushdie endorses privately but finds wantingpublicly. Hence, Midnight’s Children offers a bleak view of India’spolitical future, while at the same time providing a magical happyending where Saleem’s finances are concerned. The irony of myepigraph, then, is that although Midnight’s Children seeks to clarifydemocracy’s ideals, it also blots out sociopolitical alternatives thatearlier Indian English novelists had envisioned. In the end, Midnight’sChildren leaves us with little more than a market society, and thevictory of Saleem’s liberal-capitalist social model over Gandhianideology turns out to be a Pyrrhic one.


I.

The Indian English novel of the 1950s through the 1970s is much-maligned. For Rege, the genre stagnates as “the new-forged nation-state presses particularly heavily on the individual, molding thepersonal to the national, reproducing, maintaining and consolidatingthe national ideology at every level of society”; faced with such socialcontrol, writers often “turned away from the public sphere alto-gether, in angry, bleak existentialist novels that charted alienation,interiority, and madness.”13 The problem with Rege’s analysis is that itpresupposes that writers of this period shared Rushdie’s ideologicalorientation—they were attempting to write novels depicting middle-class bourgeois individuality and failing because any vital individual-ism was snuffed out by a hegemonic state discourse. I think the truthis the reverse: Indian English novelists of this time were generallysuspicious of individualism and bourgeois rationality.

The difference between Rushdie and earlier novelists is not thathe was more openly political than they were, or directly questionedauthority while they did not. In the work of Joshi and Sahgal, politicalleaders and economic policies are subjected to a withering critique,and Bhattacharya’s Shadow from Ladakh (1966) searches for alterna-tives to war-driven industrialization. While not as polemical, KamalaMarkandaya privileges the village in works such as Nectar in a Sieve(1954) and certainly questions the value of industrial progress andinstrumental reason. In Narayan’s work, it is hard to even locate the“coercive discourse” of the hegemonic nation-state, and when “com-mon national registers and fields of communication” that go beyondMalgudi’s communal life appear, an involvement with them is por-trayed as a fall into corruption.14 The difference between Rushdieand earlier novelists is rather that the ground of the critique of statepower underwent a radical change. If we use Rege’s term “publicsphere” in a specific sense, these novelists were suspicious preciselyof the material basis of this concept, as outlined in Habermas’s TheStructural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). According toHabermas, the generation of the ideal of the public sphere ineighteenth-century bourgeois society involved the idea of rational-critical debate conducted by equals—“human being[s] as such”—in arealm that was above the private economy and below state power.15

For the first time in human history, Habermas argues, politicalauthority was subjected to a rational critique, made in the name of auniversal public interest, a common good. Although Habermas leaves

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the specifically bourgeois aspect of the public sphere behind when hediscusses the possibility for contemporary rational-critical debate, thepublic sphere, which began with the growth of capitalism, continuesto have a basis in economic modernization.16

Indian English novelists asked whether “social wealth” can lead toanything more than crass materialism at best, or militarism andviolent social fragmentation at worst.17 This critique of modernindustrialism means that Gandhi continues to have an ideological lifein fiction through the 1960s and 1970s—indeed, the central contrastbetween Midnight’s Children’s politics and those of earlier novelsmight involve the writers’ attitudes toward Gandhi. As ParthaChatterjee observes, Gandhi’s early work Hind Swaraj (1909) func-tions as an attack on “the entire edifice of bourgeois society,”rejecting “notions of modernity and progress” that emphasize “in-creased wealth and prosperity for all and hence increased leisure,comfort, health and happiness”: “Gandhi argues that far from achiev-ing these objectives, what modern civilization does is make man aprisoner of his craving for luxury and self-indulgence, release the forcesof unbridled competition and thereby bring upon society the evils ofpoverty, disease, war and suffering.”18 Gandhi’s comprehensive socialcritique cannot be reduced to a sort of South Asian Romanticism(Ruskin in India), but Rushdie attempts exactly this reduction whenhe calls Gandhi a “rural, handicraft-loving, sometimes medieval fig-ure.”19 According to Rushdie, Nehru “wanted to industrialize India,to bring it into the modern age,” and while India “chose Gandhi withits heart . . . in terms of practical politics, it chose Nehru.”20

For Rushdie, the opposition between Gandhi and Nehru falls intoan opposition between tradition (or the “heart”) and modernity (thehead); politically speaking, India could only choose the latter. Butsuch an analysis is too reductive for understanding the ideology ofmany post-independence novelists, who chose Gandhi with both thehead and heart. As Ashis Nandy explains, although Gandhi indeed“hated modernity,” he is best conceptualized not as a backward-looking reactionary, but rather a “critical traditionalist.”

Gandhi did not want to defend traditions; he lived with them. Nordid he, like Nehru, want to museumize cultures within a modernframe. Gandhi’s frame was traditional but he was willing to criticizesome traditions violently. He was even willing to include in his frameelements of modernity as critical vectors. He found no dissonancebetween his rejection of modern technology and his advocacy of the


bicycle, the lathe and the sewing machine. Gandhi defied themodern world by opting for an alternative frame; the specifics in hisframe were frequently modern.21

Culturally speaking, the most notable example of Gandhi’s critical useof tradition was his reorientation of philosophical Hinduism, giving ita political and activist orientation. Bhikhu Parekh observes thatalthough Gandhi retained the centrality of Brahman (the universalessence or spirit; God) and moksha (oneness with Brahman), heshifted Hinduism’s emphasis from contemplation and withdrawalfrom worldly concerns to an engagement with everyday, practicalaffairs. “He made karmayoga (the yoga of action) . . . the centralprinciple of Hinduism. Karmayoga is, of course, as old as the Gita.However, karma in the Gita is tied to caste and defined in terms ofthe limited and static conception of caste duties. Gandhi definedkarma in terms of social service and political struggle.”22 The mostfamous example of Gandhi’s reorientation of religious tradition alongactivist lines was his concept of satyagraha, which involved overcom-ing oppression not through force but through nonviolent resistanceintended to persuade or convert the oppressors. As Sahgal puts it inThe Day in Shadow (1971), ahimsa (the principle of nonviolence)was “Hinduism’s oldest idea,” but Gandhi’s achievement was turningthe idea into active political praxis which sent “a whole nation into[nonviolent] battle.”23

Of course, one may argue against making a strict division betweenHabermas’s concept of the public sphere and a Gandhian conceptionof politics. Gandhi, after all, worked as a journalist, like Habermas,and spent his life working for equitable democracy.24 As ThomasPantham points out, both thinkers “favour the reclamation of thepublic/political sphere by the people from the technocrats of socialpower,” and moreover “advocate a consensual or communitarianconception of moral-political truth, which reintegrates politics andethics.”25 The problem, however, with treating Gandhi’s ideology asan Indian variant of public-sphere theory is that it would subsume histhought under a larger narrative of Western modernity and deracinateits stringent critique of capitalism and the modern nation-state.26 FredDallmayr has noted that while Habermas certainly opposes the trendsof technocracy and the scientization of politics, his historical modelsare indebted to post-World War II theories of social progress: “Thus,we encounter again the three stages of political development . . . thestages of primitive, traditional, and modern systems,” which, overall,

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make for a “teleological schema” characterized by a “relentlessmodernism.”27

To use Nandy’s terms, this makes Habermas’s “critical modernism”quite different from Gandhi’s “critical traditionalism.”28 First, Gandhi’sadherence to religious tradition (if a reinterpreted tradition) gives hispolitical science an emphasis on emotion and spirituality that islacking in Habermas’s thought. According to Pantham, “The maindifference between Habermas and Gandhi is that while the former’spractico-political discourse centres around communicative rationalityand the force of better arguments, the latter’s satyagraha is based notonly on reason but also on love and self-suffering.” Importantly, thislove and self-suffering becomes the basis of direct action againstoppression: “Habermas’s practical discourse is largely a thought-experiment, while Gandhi’s satyagraha is a mode of direct action thatruptures the theory-practice dichotomy.”29 Second, Gandhi’s concep-tion of politics bypasses the Western emphasis on the marketplaceand industrial development. As Chatterjee remarks, satyagraha wasparadoxically “a movement supported by the [Indian] bourgeoisiewhich rejected the idea of progress.”30 Favoring the health of thecommunity over the unfettered development of the individual,Gandhi opposed the urban-industrial nation-state with the concept ofthe small, self-sufficient village. Such communities encouraged aform of individuality that was based upon offering service to others;political problems would often be subsumed within everyday, practi-cal interactions between these individuals, instead of being resolvedby “the edicts of political authorities or specialists who buttressedtheir solutions with the threats of violence.”31 India, Gandhi argued,could achieve true swaraj (self-rule) only through such a communalideal.

Overall, Gandhi does not fit into any neat division betweentradition and modernity; what he provides for contemporary politicalthought is the concept of an alternative modernity which retainstradition (especially religious tradition) as a basic framework. Whatone might call the tragedy of the Indian English novelist afterindependence is that the vision of utopian localism, or politicallyefficacious satyagraha, became increasingly unreal. We will not findthe ideological coherence in Bhattacharya or Sahgal that we find innovels like Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) or Raja Rao’sKanthapura (1938). Nevertheless, Gandhian ideology enabled politi-cal criticism that is every bit as strong as Midnight’s Children’s, aswell as a critique of materialism that is largely absent from Rushdie’s


work. Indeed, I shall argue below that Gandhi’s rejection of standardnotions of modernity and progress led Rushdie to “impertinentlyexcis[e] from the narrative” any mention of his role in the nationaliststruggle, as Brennan complains.32

II.

An account of Gandhian ideology in post-independence IndianEnglish fiction can begin with Narayan. Ian Almond points out thatalthough Narayan is often viewed as a traditional writer, he does notstraightforwardly valorize a timeless tradition versus the exigencies ofmodernity: rather, his stories oscillate “between the modernity whichdisappoints and the traditions which stultify.”33 Perhaps Narayan’sinvestment is not in tradition per se, but in a contrast of industrialismand materialism with Gandhian social norms. According to Rama Jha,“If Narayan upholds the traditional Indian values in his novels, theyare certainly not of the Upanishadic or of the later brahmanic kind,according to which the world is a maya, and renunciation of which inorder to realize the identity of Self with the Ultimate is the highestwisdom . . . [rather,] as in the Gandhian view of life, the socio-political world remains a reality to be comprehended and tackled.”34

Waiting for the Mahatma (1955) is a sort of Gandhianbildungsroman that charts its protagonist’s growth from selfish privi-lege to local, committed activism. Sriram is initially a lazy young manwho seeks only a secure middle-class lifestyle. Falling in love with thedevout Gandhian Bharati, he serves in the Quit India movement,although he still has no consistent political ideals (at one point hebecomes an anti-British terrorist). However, at the story’s end he is amore mature character whose marriage to Bharati will involve theadoption of thirty children orphaned by the Partition riots. Bharatitells Sriram, “Don’t ask whether they are Muslim children or Hinduchildren or who they are. It is no use asking that; we don’t know. Wehave given them only the names of flowers and birds. Bapuji[Gandhi] said once that even a number would be better than a name,if a name meant branding a man as of this religion or that. . . . Thesechildren must grow up only as human beings.”35 Passages such asthese clearly distinguish Narayan’s Gandhian communalism fromcontemporary far-right communalism, which equates a Hindu-onlylocalism with Indian national identity.36 According to Patrick ColmHogan, Gandhian ideology militates against ascribed “categorialidentities,” which set up invidious “in-group/out-group” divisions,

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and instead stresses interactive “practical identities,” which are basedupon “the entire complex of habits, expectations, abilities, routinesthat integrate one’s daily activities with those of a community.”37 Bythe end of Mahatma, Sriram and Bharati have created just suchpractical identities for themselves and, by extension, their children;as Richard Cronin observes, “the life [they] embark on so happily isGandhi’s proper memorial, for this achievement was to instill in hisfollowers a sense of social responsibility.”38

Narayan, then, is not as sunk in Hindu tradition as V. S. Naipauland others have made him out to be. Indeed, a work such as TheGuide (1958), which portrays a somewhat disreputable, money-driven character who manages to attain a sense of social responsibil-ity, reinterprets religious tradition along Gandhian lines. Much of thenovel functions as a Gandhian reading of the Bhagavad-Gita’ssixteenth chapter, with Raju succumbing to his demoniac, world-loving, acquisitive nature, using his wife to achieve great wealth and(by proxy) fame. “Our coffee bill alone amounted to three hundred amonth, enough to maintain a middle-class family in comfort,” Rajubrags.39 His success in a nation-spanning commercial economy evengives him political power, as he “could get a train reservation at amoment’s notice, relieve a man summoned to jury work, reinstate adismissed official . . . influence worth buying at the current marketprice.”40 However, after serving prison time and losing his fortune,Raju learns the virtues of self-sacrifice and “full application, outsidemoney and [sexual] love,” as he undergoes a ritual of fasting,ostensibly to bring rain to a drought-stricken series of villages.41

Spivak focuses on the epistemological shift involved in the questionof whether or not Raju’s fast actually brings rain, arguing thatNarayan replicates for Hinduism the European “transition fromChristian psychobiography to romantic imagination. . . . At thecolonial limit, sacred geography thus became an interior landscape.”42

But in her haste to identify Narayan as an elite writing in the “colonialmode,” Spivak overlooks the sociological point of The Guide’s conclu-sion, which deemphasizes the uniqueness of Raju as an individualand puts no emphasis on his imagination.43 As Mukherjee observes,what is important for Narayan is the communal bonding that makesRaju’s self-sacrifice efficacious: “The faith of hundreds of people hasa certain strength in itself that can transform even a shady characterlike Raju into an agent of grace.”44 Indeed, the initial impetus forRaju’s fast is not the drought, but rather the communal conflict whichthe drought has stimulated. When two villages are readying them-


selves for a bloody fight over the scarce resources, Raju insists “I’llnot eat till [the villagers] are good.”45 Hereafter they are united by theself-sacrifice of an initially reluctant satyagrahi, whose vow is trans-muted into a promise to bring rain by a small boy. As one villagerexclaims, “[Raju] is like Mahatma. When Mahatma Gandhi wentwithout food, how many things happened in India! This is a man likethat.”46 Raju’s fast draws the attention of the Indian government andthe mass media, but no large-scale organizational responses to theproblem of drought are forthcoming. Instead, Narayan chooses toillustrate an alternative Gandhian social ideal, which as Chatterjeeexplains “is not meant to be a consensual democracy with completeand continual participation by every member of the polity,” butrather involves politics being “directly subordinated to a communalmorality.”47

In sum, if it is sometimes difficult to locate Narayan’s politics—if,in Cronin’s words, Narayan seems to “salute Gandhi as a saint whileleaving as vague as possible his role as a statesman”—it may bebecause the politics are embedded, as it were, within Malgudi’scommunal norms.48 Hence, while I grant her criticism of Narayan’sandrocentrism, I think Harveen Mann overstates her case when sheclaims that Narayan’s novels promulgate “the master discourse ofHindu, Gandhian India” with “middle-class nationalist-ideological”characters and imagery.49 Narayan’s writing simply has more criticalpotential than this. According to Parekh, since Gandhi was not anykind of nationalist ideologue, his relationship to a nationalist “masterdiscourse” is questionable.

[His] political thought . . . more or less completely bypassed thecharacteristic nature and vocabulary of European nationalism, andconceptualised the Indian struggle for independence in a non-nationalist and non-national language. He rarely used the term “nation”except when forced to do so by such antagonists as Jinnah. . . . Whenhe occasionally used the term “nationalism” he largely meant “love ofone’s country.” For the most part he preferred to speak of swadeshi[local, traditional] spirit which captured the interrelated ideas ofcollective pride, ancestral loyalty, mutual responsibility and intellectualand moral openness.50

I suggest that Narayan’s “nationalism” was similar in character. For allof its prosaic qualities, Malgudi has elements of the Gandhian ideal ofswaraj, whose principles K. Raghavendra Rao identifies as “absenceof a high degree of competition based on individual acquisitiveness,

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limited technological knowledge and skills, limited inequalities, lim-ited exploitation, and a general framework of structured closeness.”51

Indeed, the very stylistic and thematic qualities that Narayan is oftencriticized for—a flatness of tone and a lack of attention to the castesystem—can be linked to this communal ideal that is at odds withbourgeois individualism.

Narayan employs stylistic minimalism not just to make his novelsreadable to overseas audiences, as Spivak and Mukherjee haveargued, but to make an ideological point.52 A. N. Kaul observes thatfor Narayan, community means “human communication in matters ofquotidian living,” as opposed to communication associated with themass media.53 Malgudi’s largely harmonious community is basedupon face-to-face interaction. The content of this communication isoften mere gossip, but it “certainly cut[s] across professional and classlines and embrac[es] the community as a whole.” Kaul concludes thatNarayan’s attempt to render this utopian localism is “perhaps onereason or at least justification for [his] use of ordinary undifferenti-ated prose in dialogue, his avoidance of idiosyncratic speech andverbal misunderstanding.”54 A similar point can be made about Narayan’streatment of caste. Asserting that what is important in India is notcaste but sub-caste (jati), D. A. Shankar points out that terms fromIndia’s classical fourfold varna classification scheme, as well as broadcaste terms in general, “do not have any social content. . . . It is notpossible in actual life to come across a Brahmin.”55 Narayan, however,ignores the nuanced types of jati, preferring to treat caste in thebroadest possible terms: “the growth that we see in Sriram, Raju’ssuccess—if it can be called that—are in no way related to their casteaffiliation,” which is only “vaguely suggested.”56 Although Shankardepicts this tendency as a weakness, leading to a “pathetically thin-looking social reality,” Narayan’s lack of attention to the local detail ofthe caste system is not a whitewashing of Indian society but ratherorients Malgudi toward the swaraj ideal. Gandhi’s desire was to“obliterate the ‘sin’ of the existing jati divisions in Indian society andthe ‘deadly sin’ of untouchability in particular, and to replace it by anidealized scheme based on the varna classification.”57 In a quiet way,Narayan realizes this benign hierarchy in his fiction, where caste is ageneral basis for social order instead of a constant determinant ofeveryday behavior. Narayan, then, can be seen not as a reactionaryantimodernist, but rather as a critical traditionalist in the Gandhianmode. Malgudi has many modern aspects—a certain amount oftechnological change, and a degree of social mobility—but bypasses


the Western-oriented developmental model that undergirdsHabermas’s concept of the public sphere.

An opposition between local, communal values and the politics ofa large nation-state would seem to correspond to an oppositionbetween Narayan and Gandhi on the one hand, and Rushdie andNehru on the other. What complicates this opposition is IndianEnglish novelists who supported Gandhi and Nehru at the sametime, painting a broad social canvas while still adhering to a Gandhianmode of social criticism. Although Nehru was Nayantara Sahgal’suncle, she contributed to a staple genre of fiction after Indepen-dence, the novel of lost Gandhian public virtue. Sahgal wrote in hermemoir Prison and Chocolate Cake (1954), “Our growing up wasIndia’s growing up into political maturity—a different kind of politi-cal maturity from any the world had seen before, based on anideology inspired by self-sacrifice, compassion and peace.”58 Sahgal’snovels depict a post-independence India falling away from thisideology into materialism and competitive individualism.59 The Dayin Shadow attacks a Congress Party that uses the memory of Gandhito appeal to the masses while abandoning his teaching, becoming“inflated with office, and unerring in its attack on the wrong things.”60

India is embracing an ideology of economic development that makesthe question of political alignment in the early 1970s—with the Westand capitalism, or with the East and Marxism—simply a matter ofchoosing a partner for a joint venture in oil drilling. Sahgal relent-lessly emphasizes that Hinduism must revitalize itself and thatnonviolence must become an active, consciously willed ideal; other-wise politicians will continue to appeal to the lowest commondenominator, reinforcing caste prejudices and an intolerant commu-nalism based upon ascribed categorial identities. Although the novelis ostensibly about the attempt of a divorced woman (Simrit) to winself-respect, it has very little plot, functioning more as a tract, a “formof powerful exhortation to the nation,” with the final quarter of thebook given over entirely to a discussion of India’s lack of guidingideals, and the potential for new ones.61

However, for all its political critique, The Day in Shadow does notfunction as a call for a public sphere, as its form of exhortation isbased on a “religious model of nationalism,” as Minoli Salgado pointsout.62 Sahgal’s desire is precisely to introduce a new form of beliefinto Indian politics that will stimulate collective action. As thecharacter Ram Krishan states, “People like myself and Simrit and somany others . . . are deeply religious. That awareness of good, of God,

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of the universe, whatever one called it, was pervasive and supreme. Itdescended to the dust of the village. It was everywhere. It had to bemade to yield results, to become a song on one’s lips, a great fightingstrength—and it was not, today.”63 India, says Krishan, had “the willto act” under Gandhi, who “took ahimsa—non-violence—Hinduism’soldest idea and sent a whole nation into battle with nothing but that.Who would have thought it possible?”64 He concludes his perorationby asking, “Are we really so bankrupt that we haven’t such men, onesingle such man?”65 To some degree, then, the novel becomes alament for the fighting strength of the national movement, since inthe absence of a leader like Gandhi, there seems to be no alternativeto the bureaucracy of the Congress Party.

For many Indian English novelists, the brief war with China in1962 represented a unique loss of national innocence—an abandon-ment of the Gandhian heritage. This event stimulated Bhattacharya’sShadow from Ladakh, perhaps the landmark political novel writtenbetween 1947 and 1981.66 Bhattacharya sets up a stark oppositionbetween the possible and the actual as he documents the frictionbetween Gandhigram, which tries to realize Gandhi’s communalvillage ideal in programmatic fashion, and Steeltown, an industrialcenter that wants to incorporate Gandhigram’s land as it prepares forthe coming war with China. The conflict is mirrored on a personallevel between Satyajit, the “ruler” of Gandhigram who “by his moralquality and habitual adherence to truth, always expresses the collec-tive will,” and Bhashkar, a Nehruvian technocrat who carries thevalues of modern civilization against what he regards as Gandhigram’sossified tradition.67

Initially Ladakh comes across as a swan song for Gandhianideology, in terms of both the communal ideal and political praxis.Emerging from his utopian social isolation in an attempt to unify thecountry through a new antiwar satyagraha, Satyajit’s attempt toorganize a massive peace march is a failure. As Steeltown encroaches,Satyajit steadily loses his control over the community—characterslike the former untouchable Jhanak, although technically a part ofGandhigram, feel the industrial center has more to offer them.However, Satyajit achieves a Gandhian level of moral influence whenhe goes on a fast protesting the incorporation.68 “The people’s willwas being stirred all over India. The press carried reports of massmeetings, impassioned speeches.”69 Satyajit’s satyagraha wins overthe Steeltown workers, who demonstrate against the takeover.“[S]logans took almost instant shape: Hands off Gandhigram! . . . We


have no quarrel with the spinning wheel! . . . Gandhi-ji, arise! . . . Soulforce, not brute force! . . . Men of Gandhigram, we are yourbrothers!”70

It would be easy enough to claim that Bhattacharya wants to haveit both ways here, and that Ladakh’s Gandhianism ultimately servesas window dressing for a state-driven modernization project. Indeed,the book’s social resolution is made in the manner of a Victoriannovel—with a marriage plot—as Bhashkar marries Satyajit’s daughterSumita. However, it is worth noting that in Ladakh Bhattacharyaexplores a dilemma for which Gandhi himself had no clear answer:what to do after independence, when the antagonist is an internal oneinstead of a foreign oppressor? According to Chatterjee, Gandhianideology “could not admit that capitalists must be coerced intosurrendering their interests . . . it could not find the ideologicalmeans to turn [its] morality into an instrument of the politicalorganization of the largest popular elements of the nation against thecoercive structures of the state.”71 It seems important, then, thatSatyajit’s satyagraha is ultimately turned, not against the invadingChinese, but precisely against the forces of the Indian state. WhatBhattacharya is trying to preserve is Gandhi’s unique contribution topolitical science, which ruptures the means-ends dichotomy thatstructures Western political thought. As Max Weber put it in “Politicsas a Vocation,” “The decisive means for politics is violence. . . .Whosoever contracts with violent means for whatever ends—andevery politician does—is exposed to its specific consequences.”72

Ladakh at least holds out as a possibility that India’s border conflictscan be resolved through nonviolent means, instead of through thedevelopment of an Indian military-industrial complex. Jha overstatesthe case when she says the book’s conclusion represents the victory ofa village economy and nonviolence over heavy industry and themachinery of war, but Gandhigram’s endurance as a moral beacondoes seem like a small triumph over what Bhattacharya calls the“spiritual corrosion” of industrialism.73

Arun Joshi’s The Apprentice (1974) also offers a Gandhian re-sponse to post-1962 industrial militarism, with its scathing attackupon a nation gone completely astray, “a New Slavery with newmasters: politicians, officials, the rich, old and new.”74 Ratan Rathor’sstory begins by recounting the self-sacrifice of a successful lawyerwho gives up his practice and wealth to serve in the Quit Indiamovement. “Bourgeois filth, my father used to mock. Careers andbourgeois filth. And he would laugh off his friends who advised him

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not to give up his practice.”75 His son is venal and avaricious,propagandizing for the Indo-China war at the same time that hehelps to sell defective equipment to the military. By the book’s endRatan considers himself “a man without honour; a man withoutshame.”76 However, if the nation as a whole has abandoned thesatyagraha ideal, Joshi does offer hope for redemption on theindividual level. As K. D. Verma points out, Ratan expiates his guilt ina manner “more Gandhian than Vedantic,” wiping the shoes of atemple congregation each morning in an attempt to find “a definitiverelationship between his own moral conscience and social good.”77 Ofcourse, the question that Dorothy Blair Shimer asks about Shadowfrom Ladakh can also be asked of The Apprentice: “[T]he unresolveddilemma, it seems to me, would be that having to do with the powerof Gandhi’s principle of ahimsa set against the acceleration ofviolence in the world order. When violence becomes the order of theday at every level of life, is there sufficient redemptive power inindividual lives dedicated to the principle of ahimsa?”78 Neverthe-less—in contrast to the apocalyptic climax of Midnight’s Children,where Saleem is sucked into an apolitical “annihilating whirlpool ofthe multitudes” (552)—an adherence to Gandhian ideology enablesRatan to envision some kind of communal future in which young menand women are “[w]illing to learn and ready to sacrifice. . . . It is acold dawn. But no matter. A dawn, after all, is a dawn.”79 We can seehow a careful attention to Gandhian ideology provides readings ofIndian English fiction that are radically different from Rege’s: Ratan’sadherence to his father’s social idealism is precisely what keeps himfrom committing suicide or going insane.

In sum, the point here is not to uncritically valorize Gandhianideology as expressed by Indian English novelists, but rather toemphasize that Indian English writing from 1947 to 1981 was not aperiod of nationalist quiescence. Novelists continued to comment onpublic issues and denounce the failures and compromises of thepostcolonial state; much of the extolling of the political significance ofMidnight’s Children is therefore redundant. Further, when Rushdie’spolitics are attacked for being ambivalent or even covertly in supportof global capitalism, critics are unaware that Midnight’s Childrenpaved over an entirely different set of ideological concerns. Forexample, M. Keith Booker has recently argued that a “calm, acces-sible, realistic mode” of fiction, such as that of the Soviet realists, maymount a more “powerful assault on bourgeois ideology” thanpostmodern stylistic complexity. Arguing that Rushdie is more of a


bourgeois postmodern writer than a postcolonial writer, and implic-itly equating Marxism with postcolonialism, Booker puts writers likeNgugi wa Thiong’o under the rubric of the genuinely postcolonial, inopposition to the “ostentatious literary artifice” of Midnight’s Chil-dren.80 Since he valorizes moral earnestness and critiques of bour-geois civilization, Booker would do well to look inside India for suchvalues, at the accessible realism of the Indian English writersdiscussed above. This analysis, however, would complicate his as-sumption that Marxism is the necessary ideological vehicle forpostcolonial opposition to capitalist society, as the resistance ofIndian English novelists often has an explicitly religious basis. Ascritical traditionalists, they retained what Nandy calls a “language ofspirit” which enabled pointed political criticism.81

III.

In Midnight’s Children, India is literally reborn at the moment ofindependence, and Gandhi is erased from history (just as the VintageBook of Indian Writing 1947–1997 begins with a contribution fromNehru). Critics have a variety of explanations for Gandhi’s absencefrom Midnight’s Children. For Brennan, Gandhi’s independencemovement is marginalized “without so much as a passing comment”due to Rushdie’s distance from “the sacrifices and organizationaldrudgery of actual resistance movements,” while James Harrisonemphasizes that Rushdie blamed Gandhi for the religious differencesthat led to Partition.82 Hogan goes in the opposite direction, arguingsomewhat counterintuitively that “Rushdie passed over Gandhi’s rolein history because the nature of the novel would have forced him totreat that role parodically. He had to leave Gandhi out of the novel inorder to incorporate Gandhism.”83 I argue that Gandhian ideologyruns counter to the postcolonial public sphere that Saleem constructsand its basis in bourgeois society. As noted above, Gandhi did notconceptualize Indian independence in terms of the modern nation-state and a market economy, and this is precisely the conceptualizationof postcolonial India that Saleem advances. Again, what changed inMidnight’s Children was not the possibility of resistance to politicalpower in Indian English fiction but rather the terms on which thatresistance was made. The social realism of prior novelists may nothave been stylistically innovative, but it tended to resist both liberalcapitalism and state power in the name of Gandhian models of localengagement and the self-sacrificing public virtue of the satyagrahi.

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For all of its stylistic breaking of boundaries, Midnight’s Childrenrepresents the bourgeoisification of the Indian English novel, thereimagining of India on liberal-capitalist terms.

The idea of the midnight’s children and their Conference can beviewed as the extension of Saleem’s privileged upbringing over theentire nation. Cronin has argued polemically that Midnight’s Chil-dren has no political content worth taking seriously. “[Rushdie] canwrite an Indian novel only by taking the secret place of a child’sfantasy life and, in a stupendous effort of the imagination, expandingit, until it becomes coextensive with a subcontinent. . . . [T]hechildren that Saleem talks with at night as he lies in his bed are everychild’s imaginary friends.”84 Cronin’s analysis is extremely reductive,but he has identified the basis of Saleem’s political imagination,which is to be found in the material conditions of his childhood. ThatSaleem’s imagination is so thoroughly based in the upwardly mobilemiddle class makes me skeptical of a reading of Midnight’s Children“as a narrative where the abundant multiplicity of India is threatenedby the bleak forces of binary opposition.”85 What is being threatenedis rather an ideal unity, based on what Kumkum Sangari identifies as“the specific perspectivism of the bourgeois subject.”86

We can begin by observing that Rushdie’s version of middle-classlife is much different from Narayan’s. Narayan’s main characters areon intimate terms with the people working behind Malgudi’s store-fronts, who often own the shops; for Saleem, the storefronts andadvertising slogans have a totemic power in themselves, while he isclose friends with the children whose fathers own the chains. Saleemhas many fathers, but Ahmed has the strongest influence in that his“faith” in “Businessism” provides the model for Saleem’s nationalimagination (474). Individualist adventure, the “material or spiritualambition” that for Narayan’s characters was a temptation to avoid, iscentral for Saleem.87 His own imagined centrality in Indian nationalhistory is due not just to his status as a midnight’s child who wascongratulated by Nehru, but to his being, himself, a large-scalefinancial investment.

It had already occurred to me that our family believed implicitly ingood business principles; they expected a handsome return for theirinvestment in me. Children get food shelter pocket-moneylongholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of thelittle fools think it’s a sort of compensation for having been born.“There are no strings on me!” they sing; but I, Pinocchio, saw the


strings. Parents are impelled by the profit motive—nothing more,nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, theimmense dividend of greatness. (184–85)

The basis of Saleem’s orientation toward liberal individualism (whichis arguably Rushdie’s ideological investment as well) is found in theabove passage. Many critics make an equation between Nehru andSaleem, but as Booker has noted, Saleem’s narrative is marked byhostility to state intervention in the economy. The freezing ofAhmed’s assets on the stock market leads to a literal emasculation,the icing over of his loins, while conversely baby Saleem is motivatedto walk for the first time (“I, Baby Saleem, aged exactly one year, twoweeks and one day, hauled myself upright in my cot”) when theensuing legal case is decided in Ahmed’s favor and the familycelebrates (175). The vitriol that Saleem directs against IndiraGandhi is an attitude toward government that he inherits from hisfather. “[T]he day came when he lost his temper at breakfast for thefirst time. That was the day on which taxes were raised and taxthresholds simultaneously lowered; my father flung down the Timesof India with a violent gesture and glared around him. . . . ‘It’s likegoing to the bathroom!’ he exploded, cryptically. . . . ‘You raise yourshirt and lower your trousers! Wife, this government is going to thebathroom all over us!’” (241). When Saleem hears his uncle Mustapha’schampioning of Indira Gandhi’s egalitarian economic reforms, heresents the implication that “my historic mission to rescue the nationfrom her fate” is being co-opted and feels personal disgust for thepolitician (471). By contrast, Saleem has a soft spot for entrepre-neurs. Although his neighbor Cyrus’s “meteoric rise [as] India’srichest guru” clearly involves a crass marketing of spirituality, Saleemhas a grudging admiration for the savvy of Cyrus’s mother, whosetransformation of her son realizes the comic-book legend ofSuperman’s advent; next to their commercial success, Saleem admitsthat his own version of India is “almost mundane” (323). Meanwhile,Ahmed goes from a wholesaler of leathercloth, to an owner ofBombay real estate, to a speculator on the stock market, an institutionwhich necessitates a move from the local and concrete to the nationaland abstract. (It is worth noting that Ahmed “liquefied his assets, andentered the rarefied and abstract air of financial speculation . . .invest[ing] in government bonds or bear market equities” [242] atroughly the same time Saleem begins communicating with themidnight’s children.)

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What is going on in Midnight’s Children, then, is precisely thecreation of “common national registers and fields of communication”that Ghosh claimed earlier Indian English novelists were trying toestablish.88 Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj makes a strong critique of Westernmodels of the modern nation, arguing that their transportation andcommunication systems discourage local engagement and encouragea solipsistic form of individualism:

[M]an is so made by nature as to require him to restrict hismovements as far as his hands and feet will take him. If we did notrush about from place to place by means of railways and other suchmaddening conveniences, much of the confusion that arises wouldbe obviated. Our difficulties are of our own creation. God set a limitto man’s locomotive ambition in the construction of his body. Manimmediately proceeded to discover means of overriding the limit.God gifted man with intellect that he might know his Maker. Manabused it so that he might forget his Maker. I am so constructed thatI can only serve my immediate neighbors, but in my conceit Ipretend to have discovered that I must with my body serve everyindividual in the universe.89

For all of its magical realism, Saleem’s imaginative construction of theIndian nation proceeds largely along the lines described by BenedictAnderson in Imagined Communities (1982). The unlimited locomo-tion of Saleem’s telepathy allows him to conduct what amounts to amapping and census of the new nation. As Anderson points out,religious communities were a barrier to the colonial state’s project ofclassification and labeling, as religious affiliation “served as the basisof very old, very stable imagined communities not in the least alignedwith the secular state’s authoritarian grid-map.”90 As noted above,these stable communities undergird Gandhi’s notion of local self-sufficiency. “For Gandhi,” Hogan reminds us, “transgeographicalcentralism is the oddity; localism is the norm. . . . [C]ommunal workin egalitarian conditions significantly reduces in-group/out-groupdivision and conflict.”91 By contrast, the people Saleem observes areabstracted from their embeddedness in communal relations andobjectified: he “nestled among the woolly, mystical perceptions of achanting priest,” “toured Connaught Place in New Delhi in the guiseof an auto-rickshaw driver,” flew “up into the Himalayas, into theneanderthal moss-covered hut of a Goojar tribal” (206). This survey-ing and labeling leads to transgeographical centralism, as Saleemcasts himself as a “Maker” of the new nation: “I had entered into the


illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of theland as the raw unshaped material of my gift. ‘I can find out any damnthing!’ I triumphed, ‘There isn’t a thing I cannot know!’” (207).

The telepathic “national network” (271) that enables the MidnightChildren’s Conference has the same nation-shaping function, basedas it is in Bombay, the city that Aijaz Ahmad dubs “the nerve centerof Indian capital.”92 Indeed, Saleem says that the newspaper-readingmiddle class should be as likely to believe in the existence of thechildren as anyone, since “no reader of our national press can havefailed to come across a series of—admittedly lesser—magic childrenand assorted freaks” (236). As Anderson explains, early print-capital-ists, through the dissemination of vernacular printed texts such asnewspapers, helped to create the mass reading publics that were ableto imagine themselves as a nation; newspaper-readers “graduallybecame aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of peoplein their particular language field,” forming “in their secular, particu-lar, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined commu-nity.”93 Saleem gradually becomes aware of the hundreds of midnight’schildren (who stand in for the hundreds of millions) in just this fashion,as he hears the “unconscious beacons of the children of midnight,signalling nothing more than their existence.” With language such acontentious issue in post-independence India, the children’s lan-guage field must be depoliticized when they begin to interact; hence,Saleem asserts that “below the surface transmissions . . . languagefaded away, and was replaced by universally intelligible thought-forms that far transcended words.” Of course, “nationally intelligiblethought-forms” would probably be a better term, as Saleem loses histelepathic ability when his family moves to Pakistan. Saleem dissemi-nates “thought-forms” that are ostensibly below or beside the lan-guage of the recently departed colonizers, and above the “polyglotfrenzy” of India’s plethora of vernaculars, the “babbl[ing] in every-thing from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of LucknowUrdu to the Southern slurrings of Tamil” (200).

Narayan’s Malgudi, I have argued, has elements of Gandhi’s visionof swaraj. By contrast, although Saleem states at one point that themidnight’s children can be made to represent “everything antiquatedand retrogressive in our myth-ridden nation,” the Conference actu-ally has its basis in a nationalizing, industrial economy. The questionthat remains, however, is whether the children are “the true hope offreedom” or “the bizarre creation of a rambling, diseased mind”(240)—or, to put the same question in slightly different terms,

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whether the MCC is a genuine political ideal, or a deceptive ideologythat serves the interests of an oppressive state apparatus. Noting thatthe novel’s major use of magical realism is in its depiction of themidnight’s children—“magic equals the M.C.C. and the M.C.C.equals magic”—Harrison argues that the MCC embodies thepostcolonial Indian nation’s capacity for self-renewal, for generatingnew ideas and stories.94 David Lipscomb gives the children a morespecific political significance: they are the essence of alterity, stand-ing in for “those who have been marginalized by Western centraliza-tion and modernization.”95 This case for the MCC as a special forumfor the subaltern seems overstated, however, since it overlooksSaleem’s elite privilege and his affinity for largely Western models ofdevelopment. Brennan approaches the MCC from the oppositedirection, arguing that Saleem’s story as a whole is “a paradigm of thestate lie.”96 The upper-class Saleem’s narration of a tall tale to theworking-class Padma is a model for the ideological control exercisedby nation-building elites over the Indian masses. The nation-state islittle more than a mechanism for their exploitation, ultimately drivenby Western economic interests.97

The truth, I think, is somewhere in the middle: the MCC is morerationalistic and “Western” than Harrison and Lipscomb think, butthe key point in regard to Brennan is that Rushdie is not necessarilycynical about the postcolonial bourgeois class.98 Saleem is deeplycommitted to a critical discussion of political control—or, inHabermasian terms, to the ideal of “a sphere of private people cometogether as a public” with the ability to “make claims against thepublic authority.”99 Despite his often statelike imagination, Saleem isnot a technocrat, and his national vision involves a liberal resistanceto state power. Although Rushdie will eventually make a sociologicaldeconstruction of Saleem’s privileged position, the early part ofMidnight’s Children functions as an inquiry into a category of Indianbourgeois society, giving credit where due to Saleem’s genuinepolitical idealism.100 The magical-realist midnight’s children will bethe fulfillment of India’s promise of independence—in Rushdie’sversion of Indian history, the “dream [Indian citizens] all agreed todream” would be of a specifically postcolonial bourgeois publicsphere (130).

Habermas emphasizes that the “protective space of the family’sinner sanctum” was not a refuge or retreat from public life, but ratherprepared the grounds for entrance into public life; it was an “intimatesphere that was oriented to a public.” “The bourgeois ideal type


assumed that out of the audience-oriented subjectivity’s well-foundedinterior domain a public sphere would evolve in the world ofletters.”101 In the same way, Saleem’s private life is oriented toward anaudience. “Our lives, at this period, were shaped by correspondence.The Prime Minister wrote to me when I was just seven days old—before I could even wipe my nose I was receiving fan letters fromTimes of India readers” (157). Not only are politics constantlydebated at Saleem’s home on Warden Road, but his uncle Hanif’sapartment functions as a salon, where artists and members of theintelligentsia gather to play cards and discuss issues of the day.

[M]y uncle’s house was still a popular place. On card-evenings, itwould burst at the seams with jazzmen gossiping about quarrels andreviews in American magazines. . . . The air was thick with political,and other, chatter. “As a matter of fact, I am the only artist in Indiawho paints with a genuine sense of ideological commitment!” . . .One of the regulars at Hanif Aziz’s legendary card-evenings was aTimes of India staff photographer, who was full of sharp tales andscurrilous stories. My uncle introduced me to him: “Here’s thefellow who put you on the front page, Saleem.” (294–95)

The constant attention to newspaper headlines in Midnight’s Children’snarrative means that Saleem was cognizant of public issues at an earlyage. The content of these newspapers, meanwhile, is not so commer-cialized that it precludes rational-critical debate. The trial of Com-mander Sabarmati does not involve merely the private consumptionof a human-interest story; it is rather a “theatre in which India willdiscover who she was, what she is, and what she might become,” asone newspaper declares (314). The Sabarmati trial, and the fluctua-tion in “public opinion” that surrounds it (315), involve a move awayfrom a feudalistic “publicity of representation” that emphasizes fame,dignity, and honor toward a public exercise of reason mediated byprint.102 “[I]s India to give her approval to the rule of law, or to theancient principle of the overriding primacy of heroes?” (317). WhenSaleem sees headlines stating “STATE GOVERNMENT FLOUTSLAW! SABARMATI SCANDAL NOW A PUBLIC DISGRACE!,”“[he] knew [Sabarmati] was done for” (316). Rushdie even blurs theHabermasian line between the printed letter (which encouragesrational-critical debate) and newer technologies like radio and film(which encourage passive culture-consumption); Saleem’s uncle Hanifis “the only realistic writer working in the Bombay film industry,

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[who] was writing the story of a pickle-factory created, run, andworked in entirely by women” (292).

Midnight’s Children does not offer a programmatic outline of astrictly rational-critical Indian citizenry that existed shortly afterindependence. Hanif’s film script goes unproduced, and Sabarmatidraws vast amounts of hero-worship. What matters is that Saleem issurrounded by political debate in the high bourgeois setting of hischildhood, and has a basis for imagining a public sphere in apostcolonial context in which people of different social classes andracial backgrounds will meet to discuss issues of public significance.In contrast to the English-language Times of India, “the purerlanguage of thought” allows both the literate and illiterate to partici-pate (308). Although Saleem calls them a “glorious congress” (306)and a magical-realist “lok sabha” (271), the children are not actually apart of the state, but critics of the public authority. The MCC is notaligned with statist planning but is rather a “loose federation ofequals, all points of view given free expression” (263). They wereoriginally 1001 in number, “the number of night, of magic, ofalternative realities—a number beloved of poets and detested bypoliticians for whom all alternative visions of the world are threats”(259). Although the children are “as raucous, as undisciplined as anybunch of five hundred and eighty-one ten year olds,” “jabberingarguing giggling,” they are also capable of maintaining a surprisinglyhigh level of critical argument (272). In fact, perhaps the mostmagical aspect of the children is the way they converse as adults, inconformance with Habermas’s Enlightenment narrative of education,maturity, and rationality:

You ask: these are ten-year-olds? I reply: Yes, but. You say: didten-year-olds, or almost-elevens, discuss the role of the individual insociety? And the rivalry of capital and labour? Were the internalstresses of agrarian and industrialized zones made explicit? Andconflicts in socio-cultural heritages? Did children of less than fourthousand days discuss identity, and the inherent conflicts of capitalism?Having got through fewer than one hundred thousand hours, didthey contrast Gandhi and Marxlenin, power and impotence? Wascollectivity opposed to singularity? Was God killed by children?Even allowing for the truth of the supposed miracles, can we nowbelieve that urchins spoke like old men with beards?

I say: maybe not in these words; maybe not in words at all, but inthe purer language of thought; but yes, certainly, this is what was atthe bottom of it all. (307–8)


“Urchins spoke like old men with beards”; a synecdoche for theIndian general public, the MCC functions as a print-based publicsphere in the political realm would, one that is below state authorityand above the private sphere of economic activity.103 Hence, whereMidnight’s Children is concerned, it is a moot point as to whether theNehruvian legacy is a “black box” of social control or a “spirit ofsecular and democratic independence.”104 Midnight’s Children doesnot displace Gandhian ideology with Nehruvian conceptions of aplanned economy and social welfare: rather, Saleem is orientedtoward liberal capitalism instead of Fabian socialism, and the Mid-night Children’s Conference is essentially a bourgeois utopian ideal.

In short, just as we can locate a nostalgia for the rational individualin a novel like The Satanic Verses (1988), Midnight’s Children’snostalgia is specifically for a newly independent India in whichpolitical and cultural issues were actively debated.105 If Habermaslocates the generation of the utopian ideal of the public sphere inEurope’s historical past (not the ideal itself, since Habermas empha-sizes the ideal was never realized), Rushdie locates the creation of thepossibility of such an ideal in the post-independence India of the1950s.

IV.

A bourgeois public sphere of a specifically postcolonial andmagical-realist sort replaces Gandhian ideology in Rushdie’s story ofIndian nation-forming. But, having displaced Gandhi, do the ill-fatedmidnight’s children bequeath India any sort of viable political legacy?Michael Gorra and Neil ten Kortenaar think so. For Gorra, Saleem’spublication of his memoir can be read as a public service, while inKortenaar’s account, the national ideal “is revealed to be arbitrary butuseful, an inevitably compromised wager against the darkness. . . . [I]fthere is a glimmer of hope at the end of the novel, it is that Saleem isable to claim one of Shiva’s offspring as his own son . . . and [write] hisautobiography for his son (just as Rushdie dedicates the novel tohis).”106 Even critics who see Rushdie’s national vision as entirelybleak—involving “a form of Foucauldian control . . . as the key toexplaining human experience”—think the “written history” of Saleem’snarrative provides “continuity and a future.”107 The problem withthese readings is that they equate Saleem’s mass-produced, printedmemoir with the ideal of the public sphere, without making Habermas’sdistinction between rational-critical publicity and passive culture-

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consumption. That is, they do not distinguish between politics andeconomics: in the end, Midnight’s Children’s social vision is despair-ing in regard to public action (represented by the midnight’s chil-dren), but benign and indeed transcendent with respect to the privatesphere of the marketplace (represented by Saleem’s autobiography).

Let us begin with the dissolution of the public sphere. AlthoughSaleem himself would have us interpret his memoir as the story of ademocratic nation betrayed by the Emergency, this is entirely toosimple a reading. The failure of Saleem’s political project is to belinked directly to his class background: his utopic horizon is alwayscircumscribed by the view from Methwold’s Estate in Bombay, thesetting of his privileged childhood innocence. The problem withRushdie’s children of midnight is that they are only superficiallydazzling; politically speaking, the Midnight Children’s Conference isultimately not fabulous enough. Nancy Fraser argues that if limitedto its bourgeois form, the ideal of the public sphere involvesassumptions that make it an inherently unrealizable concept; it willalways be abstract and exclusive. Saleem makes similar assumptions.Over and over he emphasizes the need for unity, for finding a singlepurpose, an almost mystical “third principle” (306) that will overcomesocial cleavages—for Saleem, the MCC must be “restricted todeliberation about the common good.”108 The key word here is“deliberation.” In contrast to Gandhi’s emphasis on practical action,Saleem wants to keep the ideal of the public sphere free from thecontamination of India’s actual social conditions, safeguarding thechildren from adulthood and a fall into socioeconomic particularity.When he says that “[f]or the sake of their privacy, I am refusing todistinguish their voices from one another . . . they were the veryessence of multiplicity, and I see no point in dividing them now,” thisparadoxically gives the children a homogenous quality, as “multiplic-ity” simply means the variety of the children’s special midnight-givenpowers (274). The diversity of the children’s powers does notcorrespond with diverse sociopolitical issues. Indeed, Saleem be-comes uncomfortable when such issues are addressed, lumping“declarations of women’s rights and pleas for the improvement of thelot of untouchables” in with a plan to “bewitch, and fly, and readminds, and turn [people] into frogs” (273).

Gandhi’s adherence to religious tradition gave him a set of politicalmethods for redeeming modernity, in contrast with the strangevacuum behind Saleem’s emphasis on newness (“I won’t deny I wasdisappointed [by the children’s proposals]. . . . Nowhere, in the


thoughts of the Conference, could I find anything as new as our-selves” [273–74]). Saleem sees the postcolonial public sphere erodingwhen “Brahmins began to feel uneasy at permitting even theirthoughts to touch the thoughts of untouchables” and when “amongthe low-born, the pressures of poverty and Communism were be-coming evident,” but a satyagrahi would not have been left helplessby such developments (306). As Pantham observes, satyagrahainvolved “various constructive programs, such as the promotion ofintercommunal unity, the removal of untouchability, adult education,and the removal of economic and social inequalities.” Further, satyagrahaoffered nonviolent means for achieving these ends: “purificatory orpenitential actions” such as prayers and fasts, noncooperation such asboycotts and strikes (hartal), and acts of civil disobedience such aspicketing and the defiance of laws.109 A Gandhian conception ofpolitics—the “[political] science of love,” as Chatterjee terms it—might have given Saleem a coherent alternative to Shiva’s argumentthat “there is only money-and-poverty, and have-and-lack. . . . Thingsand their makers rule the world” (307).110 In short, perhaps a Gandhi-influenced fabulism would have given the midnight’s children some-thing to do. Instead, trapped by his opposition between a modern,industrial-political head and a traditional Gandhian heart (Gandhi, ofcourse, does not fall cleanly into any such opposition betweentradition and modernity), Rushdie portrays the midnight’s children as“hav[ing] no meaning until [they] were destroyed” (274). Hence, Icannot agree with Hogan’s idea that the MCC represents an “alterna-tive modernity” in which essentialist identity categories are subordi-nated to “cooperative interactions,” as this sort of orientation towardpractical group action in civil society is precisely what Saleem lacks.111

As Saleem says himself, the MCC was “‘passive-metaphorical,’ ‘pas-sive-literal,’ ‘active-metaphorical’ . . . but it never became what I mostwanted it to be; we never operated in the first, most significant of the‘modes of connection.’ The ‘active-literal’ passed us by” (286).

In sum, the midnight’s children are far more Habermasian thanGandhian; largely a “thought-experiment,” they cannot “ruptur[e]the theory-practice dichotomy” in the manner characteristic ofsatyagraha.112 Saleem’s public sphere never involves a conception of“active-literal” social reform—he is able to go along with Nehru’s“tryst with destiny” only as long as it remains a mythic quest.113

Hence, his ideal of public consensus comes to seem a false one. As inStructural Transformation, whose narration of the decline and fall ofthe public sphere often has a nostalgic and mythic quality (as

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Christian Thorne puts it, one has the feeling that Habermas “is givingthe history of an institution that never existed in the first place andthen came, over time, to exist even less”), when Saleem grows up intoadulthood there seems to be nothing else to narrate except theinevitable dissolution of his postcolonial public sphere.114 As Habermasobserves, the bourgeois public represented its particular interest asthe general interest, concealing its basis in the private economy.What made the bourgeois idea of the public sphere “more than mereideology” was the insistence that power be subject to critical public-ity; if the bourgeois public “had been forced to close itself off as theruling class,” then “critical debate would have become dogma, therational insight of an opinion that was no longer public would havebecome an authoritarian command.”115 The nineteenth century’sgrowing class inequality and market oligopolization, however, turnedthe public sphere into just such dogma.

In Midnight’s Children, Habermas’s historical narrative is tele-scoped into Saleem’s transition from childhood to adulthood. WhenSaleem learns that Shiva is Ahmed and Amina’s biological child, heconfronts the possible loss not only of parental love and historicalcentrality but also of class privilege. Something that he could take forgranted is now something that he must actively protect. “Shiva . . .would certainly insist on claiming his birthright . . . and, aghast at thevery notion of my knock-kneed antagonist replacing me in the blueroom of my childhood while I, perforce, walked morosely off the two-storey hillock to enter the northern slums . . . [I] resolved that mydestructive, violent alter ego should never again enter the increas-ingly fractious councils of the Midnight Children’s Conference; that Iwould guard my secret—which had once been Mary’s—with my verylife” (339). In so doing, Saleem abandons the principle of publicity, of“all points of view given free expression” (263). “There were nights, atthis time, when I avoided convening the Conference at all . . .because I knew it would take time, and cool blood, to erect a barrieraround my new knowledge which could deny it to the Children”(339–40). The other children, however, sense that Saleem is aban-doning the principle of publicity and assuming the position ofauthoritarian command. Demanding an explanation for Shiva’s ab-sence, “[t]hey attacked on a broad front and from every direction,accusing me of secrecy, prevarication, high-handedness, egotism; mymind, no longer a parliament chamber, became the battleground onwhich they annihilated me” (357). Throughout, Rushdie parallels thebreakdown of Saleem’s public sphere with India’s war against China;


as in Bhattacharya’s Shadow from Ladakh, the war is portrayed as aloss of national innocence, an abandonment of the ideals of indepen-dence. The difference is that, for Bhattacharya, the Gandhian ideal ofnonviolence could still offer an alternative to a militaristic industrialnationalism. Rushdie’s political idealism does not have such stayingpower. In 1962 the bourgeois ideal of critical publicity completelydissolves: to the dissenting members of the MCC, Saleem’s ideals aremere dogma, a masking of social injustice.

The dissolution of the bourgeois public sphere invites the questionof whether Midnight’s Children offers any alternative political idealsfor modern India, especially since Rushdie has stated that “mypolitics would be broadly speaking Marxist.”116 A closer look atSaleem’s conversion from “Businessism” to communism reveals thathis ideology of bourgeois individualism continues, with all of itslimitations (474). Saleem’s “ambitious project of nation-saving,” basedon admittedly “Messianic ambitions” that echo the Messianic proph-ecy of his birth by Ramram Seth, is an individual-centered effort(464). “[W]hen I tumbled out into dust, shadow and amused cheers[from the war in Bangladesh], I had already decided to save thecountry” (461). Again, Saleem’s ideals are doomed, with an opposi-tion established between an individual’s concern with ultimate valuesand cynical political goal-seeking. Although Saleem is “full of thoughtsof direct-communication-with-the-masses” in a way that is reminis-cent of his postcolonial public sphere, the communist Picture Singhlooks down on them (474). “He was no lover of democracy, however:‘God damn this election business, captain,’ he told me, ‘Wheneverthey come, something bad happens; and our countrymen behave likeclowns.’ I, in the grip of my fever-for-revolution, failed to take issuewith my mentor” (477).

Somehow Singh, a completely marginalized figure living in a NewDelhi ghetto, is potentially an agent of statist repression: thesepassages reveal the final consequences of Midnight’s Children’serasure of Gandhian ideology. For Rushdie, politics can only be thetactics of power, “at the best of times a bad dirty business” (518).117

Singh cannot offer India anything transformative or emancipatory,but only the ressentiment of an exploited class, as Saleem objects tohis “portrayal in snakedance of the unrelieved vilenesses of the rich”(493). Singh is clearly an elitist—“some persons are better, others areless,” he tells a political official (475)—who would not balk at usingforce to achieve his objectives. Ironically, Rushdie’s implicit critiqueof communism in these passages parallels Gandhi’s. According to

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Raghavan Iyer, “In 1946, when asked about Marx, [Gandhi] said thathe had a high regard for Marx’s great industry and acumen, but hecould not share the view that the use of violence could usher in non-violence.”118 As noted above, satyagraha and its underlying principleof ahimsa were a revolutionary departure from conceptions ofpolitics that had only succeeded in producing sciences of violence.Nandy explains that ahimsa “recognizes that the meek are blessed”only if they are “authentically innocent”; Gandhi’s idea of noncoop-eration stressed that “the aim of the oppressed should be not tobecome a first class citizen in the world of oppression instead of asecond or third class one, but to become the citizen of an alternativeworld where he can hope to win back his human authenticity.”119 Notauthentically innocent, Saleem himself turns out to have little to offerIndia but ressentiment. The bankruptcy of his political imagination isrevealed most fully late in the novel, when, imprisoned with thesurviving children in the Widows’ Hostel, he can only conceive of areinvigorated “Midnight Party” in terms of power and control:“[W]hat chance do politics have against people who can multiplyfishes and turn base metals into gold?” (520). The children “sitwhispering flirtatiously” to each other in their cells, but there is noway to translate this love into public, political action—there is noalternative world.

With the MCC defunct and communism (at best) impotent, thereis nothing to prevent Indira Gandhi from carrying out the fullrefeudalization of India, the dissolving of public debate into managedpublicity and manufactured consent. “Publicity once meant theexposure of political domination before the public use of reason . . .[now] Publicity imitates the kind of aura proper to the personalprestige and supernatural authority once bestowed by the kind ofpublicity involved in [feudal] representation.”120 Booker criticizesSaleem for misrepresenting the last gasp of Congress Party-ledredistributive justice, claiming that Saleem overlooks the Emergency’spopulism and “very genuine economic progress.”121 But, althoughSaleem admits that “during an Emergency . . . trains run on time[and] black-money hoarders are frightened into paying taxes” (517),his goal is to link the “despotism” of “ancient empires” with anauthoritarian welfare regime that has censored the press and alteredthe Constitution (506). In contrast to the outcome of the Sabarmatitrial, Indira Gandhi resurrects the “ancient principle of the overrid-ing primacy of heroes” (317) in her desire to possess “the shakti of thegods” (522). In Saleem’s view, a magical-realist public sphere, based


on the idea of a federation of equals and ultimate values being leftopen to debate, has been replaced by the means-ends rationality of adespot who seeks to establish her own power, both political andgodly. “New myths are needed” after the Emergency, Saleem com-ments, “but that’s none of my business” (546). Shiva and Parvati’s son,Ganesh, is incapable of public speech; born with giant flapping ears,he was “a child who heard too much, and as a result never spoke”(534). His “[m]ute autocracy” is an implacable will which seemsoriented more to an age of power politics than to an ideal of criticalpublicity.

So far, I would argue that Rushdie has held Saleem, as well asIndira Gandhi, up to severe criticism. Saleem may not have thecynicism of Shiva and Indira Gandhi’s instrumental rationality, but hisown concern with ultimate values ends up as merely a reflection ofhis privileged social status, leaving him with little but impotentnostalgia for the days of the Conference and the vibrant Bombay ofhis childhood. To observe this, however, is to point up a crucialdifference between Rushdie’s blurring of Enlightenment rationalitywith magical realism, and Habermas’s account of the public sphere’sascension and demise. Whatever criticisms one might make of hisindebtedness to conventional Western models of progress or of theabstraction of the public sphere ideal, Habermas’s goal at the end ofStructural Transformation is precisely to think his way past commer-cialism and bureaucracy—to theorize the dialectical realization of theutopian promise of the public sphere in the practical, everyday world.Saleem, by contrast, stops believing in political ideals, having en-dured an operation called “[s]perectomy: the draining-out of hope”(521). Released from detention during the Emergency, he empha-sizes that “I’ve had—I had had, on that March day—enough, morethan enough of politics”; the 420 remaining midnight’s children“mumbled farewells and dispersed, for the last time, into the healingprivacy of the crowds” (525).

We have an opposition, then, between public life and “healingprivacy.” The latter—in fact, the stability and comfort that Saleemrequires in order to write at all—is based on the functioning of theprivate economy. By day, Saleem is a factory manager for a globalbusiness enterprise (“And baba, what do you think, how could Ibelieve the whole world would want to eat my poor pickles, even inEngland they eat,” Mary tells Saleem [546]), while doing his writingat night in his office. He is not “one of your 200-rupees-a-monthcookery johnnies, but my own master” (38), “supervis[ing] the

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production of Mary’s legendary recipes” (549). Despite his socioeco-nomic fall from grace midway through the novel, his having “aban-doned-been-abandoned-by” the Indian bourgeoisie (474), the valori-zation of entrepreneurial capitalism in his narrative continues untilthe end, with his childhood ayah now “[r]ich Mary, who neverdreamed she would be rich” (547).

Politics may be a “bad dirty business” (518), but if we focus on theprivate economic sphere, Rushdie clearly offers us a fairy-tale happyending.122 What this means is that while Saleem’s public vision isblighted, the economic transformation of modern India goes onapace; if we see Saleem as a representative of India’s contemporarybourgeoisie at Midnight’s Children’s conclusion, then we have theproject of national unification and economic development withoutany viable public sphere or coherent political goals, a liberal-capitalistsocial model without any public content. The book that Saleem iswriting may reawaken old memories, but it is not addressed to apublic ready to engage in critical debate, as the midnight’s childrenwere. “[A]t Braganza Pickles, I supervise the production of Mary’slegendary recipes; but there are also my special blends . . . all whoconsume them will know what pepperpots achieved in Pakistan, orhow it felt to be in the Sundarbans . . . believe don’t believe but it’strue. Thirty jars stand upon a shelf, waiting to be unleashed upon theamnesiac nation” (549). Just as Hanif’s vision of a female-run picklefactory has been realized, but as a tale of entrepreneurial successinstead of social democracy, the midnight’s children that “hotlycontested” (272) issues of power and hierarchy have been convertedinto Midnight’s Children, a memoir that will be consumed like a jar ofpickles.

Given this linkage between Midnight’s Children’s printed Englishand mass consumption on a national and global level, it should notsurprise us that Rushdie has claimed that Indian English prosewriting since Independence “is proving to be a stronger and moreimportant body of work than most of what has been produced in the16 ‘official languages’ of India, the so-called ‘vernacular languages,’during the same time.”123 If English is somehow apolitical forRushdie and above sectarian squabble (in the same way that “univer-sally intelligible thought-forms” were [200]), it is because it is thelanguage of economics. Hindi “feels, ironically, more like a coloniallanguage to speakers of Tamil, Kannada or Malayalam than doesEnglish, which has acquired, in the South, an aura of lingua francacultural neutrality. The new Silicon Valley-style boom in computer


technology that is transforming the economies of Bangalore andMadras has made English, in those cities, an even more importantlanguage than before.”124 Rushdie’s subordination of bhasha (ver-nacular) literature to Indian English literature has generated consid-erable controversy, but critics overlook the way the introduction tothe Vintage Book of Indian Writing sets the lineage of Indian Englishfiction within the context of Midnight’s Children’s reorientation ofthat lineage. Writers like Narayan, Sahgal, and Bhattacharya usedEnglish as a medium of Gandhian ideology in a search for alternativesto liberal bourgeois individualism. For Rushdie, there is no escapingit: English is one of the major languages (if not the language) of anindustrial capitalist economy, and freedom is economic opportu-nity.125

Saleem’s life is thus a “mirror” (143) of Indian politics in a highlyironic sense: his failure of political imagination, and his retreat to apurely private realm (in the bourgeois conception) of national andglobal business enterprise, reflect the failure of public imagination ofhis social class. As Ahmad explains, “[T]he bourgeoisie has nowradically transformed its own policies and aspirations, and it haslaunched an immensely powerful offensive against that earlier na-tional compact which it now dismisses contemptuously as mere‘populism.’ The scope of the class offensive of the bourgeoisie as ithas been articulated thus far can best be gauged from the fact that‘liberalization’ today commands a consensus among the bourgeoisiefar more absolute than Nehruvianism or anything else of that kindhas ever been able to achieve.”126 In the case of Midnight’s Children,literature is no adversary to this development. His public sphere idealhaving degenerated into a relentless critique of state power and asuspicion of any political group action, Saleem leaves off writing hismemoir with no conception of the “ideological cement” or “glueholding the country together”: we are left only with a pragmaticaccommodation to the private marketplace and increasing socialpolarization.127

“I believe that the civilization India has evolved is not to be beatenin the world. Nothing can equal the seeds sown by our ancestors,”Gandhi stated.128 Saleem overwrote this declaration when he calledthe midnight’s children “the seeds of a future which would genuinelydiffer from anything the world had seen up to that time” (235).Midnight’s Children’s narrative involves the displacement of Gandhi’salternative vision of modernity: a national marketplace underminesthe concept of swaraj, and a politics based on ahimsa gives way to a

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political system undergirded by force. Not merely the representativeof a neocolonial elite, Saleem believes his Midnight Children’sConference has emancipatory potential, but this bourgeois publicsphere ideal comes to seem the flimsiest of abstractions amidst theturbulence of postcolonial Indian society. Gandhian ideology mighthave provided a way out of Midnight’s Children’s political impasse,but at the novel’s conclusion we no longer have a critical traditional-ism that could counterbalance modernity’s failed promises. WhileMary’s business may globally expand and Saleem’s memoir maybecome a bestseller, the nihilism of Midnight’s Children’s endinginvolves the idea that politically, India can no longer reimagine,question, or doubt the liberal-capitalist social model.

University of California, Irvine

NOTES

I would like to thank Susan C. Jarratt and Michael P. Clark for their helpfulcriticism and suggestions.

1 Meenakshi Mukherjee, “The Anxiety of Indianness,” in The Perishable Empire:Essays on Indian Writing in English (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 174.

2 Josna E. Rege, “Victim into Protagonist? Midnight’s Children and the Post-Rushdie National Narratives of the Eighties,” Studies in the Novel 29 (1997): 348.

3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “How to Read a ‘Culturally Different’ Book,” inColonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, andMargaret Iversen (New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 1994), 128.

4 Bishnupriya Ghosh, “An Invitation to Indian Postmodernity: Rushdie’s EnglishVernacular as Situated Cultural Hybridity,” in Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie,ed. M. Keith Booker (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1999), 149.

5 Mukherjee, “The Anxiety of Indianness,” 177; Michael Gorra, After Empire(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), 147–48.

6 See Salman Rushdie, “Introduction,” The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947–1997, ed. Rushdie and Elizabeth West (London: Vintage, 1997).

7 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 549.Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.

8 Rege, 345.9 See Ashis Nandy, “Cultural Frames for Transformative Politics: A Credo,” in

Political Discourse: Explorations in Indian and Western Political Thought, ed.Bhikhu Parekh and Thomas Pantham (New Delhi: Sage, 1987), 238–48.

10 Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World (New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1989), 79–117.

11 Brian May, “Memorials to Modernity: Postcolonial Pilgrimage in Naipaul andRushdie,” ELH 68 (2001): 261.

12 See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere(1962), trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cam-bridge: MIT Press, 1989).


13 Rege, 348. Rege does not name any of the novelists she’s thinking of; she seemsto take Joshi and Anita Desai as her model post-independence writers, and then readtheir work in Foucauldian terms.

14 Rege, 349; Ghosh, 149.15 Habermas, 88.16 See Habermas, 235.17 Habermas, 234.18 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A Derivative

Discourse? (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), 90, 86.19 Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta Books, 1991), 104.20 Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 105.21 Nandy, “Cultural Frames,” 240–41.22 Parekh, “Gandhi and the Logic of Reformist Discourse,” in Political Discourse,

279.23 Nayantara Sahgal, The Day in Shadow (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 234.24 Indeed, public dialogue enabled by print communication was a key element of

satyagraha. Regarding his South African activism, Gandhi commented that“[s]atyagraha would probably have been impossible without [the journal] IndianOpinion. The readers looked forward to it for a trustworthy account of the satyagrahacampaign as also of the real condition of Indians in South Africa. . . . I was inundatedwith letters containing the outpourings of my correspondents’ hearts. . . . It was asthough the community thought audibly through this correspondence with me. Itmade me thoroughly understand the responsibility of a journalist, and the hold Isecured in this way over the community made the future campaign workable,dignified and irresistible” (Mahatma Gandhi, An Autobiography, or The Story of MyExperiments with Truth [1929; trans. Mahadev Desai], vol. 44 of the second revisededition of The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 100 volumes [New Delhi:Publications Division, 2000], 303–4). However, we can already see what separatesGandhi from Habermas in this brief quotation: an emphasis on emotion as well asreason, and a focus on direct action.

25 Pantham, “Habermas’ Practical Discourse and Gandhi’s Satyagraha,” in PoliticalDiscourse, 292.

26 Hence, I agree with K. Raghavendra Rao when he says that we should not“dilute Gandhi to the extent of making him compatible with what he detested”(“Communication Against Communication: The Gandhian Critique of ModernCivilization in Hind Swaraj,” in Political Discourse, 276). For example, whereHabermas and capitalism are concerned, William Outhwaite remarks that Habermas’s“view [is] that modern societies cannot realistically hope to replace market structuresas a whole without risking worse problems than those of capitalism itself. He nowdefines what he means by socialism as radical democracy, with at best the hope thatthis will be able to keep in check some of the worst excesses of capitalism. To somethis will seem a realistic accommodation to the fact that capitalism is ‘the only gamein town’; others will see it as opportunism or surrender” (“General Introduction,”The Habermas Reader, ed. Outhwaite [Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1996], 18).Gandhi could not accommodate himself to this modern Western institution.

27 Fred Dallmayr, “Modernization and Postmodernization: Whither India?,” inBeyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter (Albany: State Univ. ofNew York Press, 1996), 161, 166.

28 Nandy, “Cultural Frames,” 241.

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29 Pantham, “Habermas’ Practical Discourse,” 292.30 Chatterjee, 101.31 Ronald J. Terchek, “Gandhi and Democratic Theory,” in Political Thought in

Modern India, ed. Pantham and Kenneth L. Deutsch (London: Sage, 1986), 309–10.32 Brennan, 27.33 Ian Almond, “Darker Shades of Malgudi: Solitary Figures of Modernity in the

Stories of R. K. Narayan,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 36:2 (2001): 113.Numerous critics label Narayan a straightforwardly traditional and even reactionarywriter. For example, beginning with the premise that realism is a self-defeatingliterary mode for the Indian English writer, Chelva Kanaganayakam tries torecuperate Narayan for contemporary postcolonial criticism by arguing that hiscounterrealistic fiction foregrounds the artifice involved in using the Englishlanguage to write about India. Despite this opposition to prevailing critical wisdom,his description of Narayan’s ideological vision is thoroughly conventional: “Narayan’sideological stance is fundamentally reactionary: he offers through his fiction a visionof stasis, a stratified, caste-oriented India, struggling against the encroaching valuesof modernism” (Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction [Waterloo, Ontario:Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 2002], 21).

34 Rama Jha, Gandhian Thought and Indo-Anglian Novelists (Delhi: ChanakyaPublications, 1983), 149. See also Michel Pousse, “R. K. Narayan as a GandhianNovelist,” The Literary Criterion 25:4 (1990): 77–90.

35 R. K. Narayan, Waiting for the Mahatma (London: Methuen, 1955), 245.36 See Aijaz Ahmad, Lineages of the Present (London: Verso, 2000), 171. This is a

key issue, as Ahmad observes that while proto-fascist organizations like the RashtriyaSwayamsevak Sangh (RSS) are amenable to the memory of Hinduist Gandhi, theyare completely hostile to the secularist Nehru.

37 Patrick Colm Hogan, “Midnight’s Children: Kashmir and the Politics ofIdentity,” Twentieth-Century Literature 47 (2001): 518–19. Hogan links Gandhi’semphasis on the “local and proximate” (519) to Rushdie, but I think his model ofGandhian communal morality is more convincing as an account of Narayan’sideology.

38 Richard Cronin, “Quite Quiet India,” Encounter 64:3 (1985): 58.39 Narayan, The Guide (New York: Viking Press, 1958), 168.40 Narayan, The Guide, 175.41 Narayan, The Guide, 213.42 Spivak, 130.43 Spivak, 143.44 Mukherjee, “The Tractor and the Plough,” in Considerations, ed. Mukherjee

(Columbia, Missouri: South Asia Books, 1977), 115.45 Narayan, The Guide, 87.46 Narayan, The Guide, 90.47 Chatterjee, 92, 91.48 Cronin, “Quite Quiet India,” 54.49 Harveen Mann, “‘The Magic Idyll of Antiquated India’: Patriarchal Nationalism

in R. K. Narayan’s Fiction,” Ariel 31:4 (2000): 64.50 Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1989), 194.51 Rao, 270.52 Spivak claims that many Indian readers will be dissatisfied with Narayan’s

“limpid prose,” which would seem “a bit ‘unreal,’ a tourist’s convenience directed


toward a casual unmoored international audience” (130). Mukherjee argues thatNarayan’s audience is spread “far and wide . . . hence the need for an even-tonedminimalist representation that will not depend too much on the intricacies andcontradictions in the culture and the inflections of voice which only an inside candecipher” (“The Anxiety of Indianness,” 172).

53 A. N. Kaul, “R. K. Narayan and the East-West Theme,” in Considerations, 57.54 Kaul, 57. In The Financial Expert, which records the rise and fall of money-

obsessed Margayya, Narayan gives an ironic depiction of a public sphere in the worldof letters: “Nowadays [Margayya] did not borrow the paper from the newspaperdealer but subscribed for a copy himself. He read with avidity what was happeningin the world: the speeches of statesmen, the ravings of radicals, the programme forthis and that, war news, and above all the stocks and shares market. He glancedthrough all this because a certain amount of world information seemed to be anessential part of his equipment when he sat in his office. All kinds of people came inand it was necessary that he should be able to take part in their conversation. Toimpress his clients, he had to appear as a man of all-round wisdom” (The FinancialExpert [Michigan State Univ. Press, 1953], 120). For Narayan it is Malgudi’scommunal norms that are important, which Margayya violates in his drive for powerand autonomy.

55 D. A. Shankar, “The Absence of Caste in R. K. Narayan and its Implications forIndian Writing in English,” in R. K. Narayan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives,ed. Geoffrey Kain (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1993), 52.

56 Shankar, 54.57 Chatterjee, 110.58 Sahgal, quoted in Sudarshan Sharma, The Influence of Gandhian Ideology on

Indo-Anglian Fiction (New Delhi: Soni Book Agency, 1982), 133.59 Sahgal’s endorsement of self-sacrifice for the national good is not without

ambiguity; as Minoli Salgado points out, the “Gandhian injunction to passiveresistance and self-sacrifice” demands that “women’s will power [be] sacrificed onthe altar of male-centered nationalist affirmation” (“Myths of the Nation and Female(Self)Sacrifice in Sahgal’s Narratives,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 31:2[1996]: 65). In her later work Sahgal questioned this demand for female self-sacrifice, “affirm[ing] fatalism and passivity in the process of challenging it” (71). Thepoint I wish to make is simply that Sahgal opposes courageous self-sacrifice to the“capitalism and individual greed” (Salgado, 69) that comes to dominate India in theyears after independence.

60 Sahgal, 12.61 Gobinda Prasad Sarma, Nationalism in Indo-Anglian Fiction (New Delhi:

Sterling, 1978), 276.62 Salgado, 61.63 Sahgal, 201.64 Sahgal, 234.65 Sahgal, 236.66 Bhabani Bhattacharya, Shadow from Ladakh (New York: Crown Publishers,

1966). Ladakh is an odd book, as much of a patriotic wartime-romance potboiler associal commentary, but it does reflect seriously on the relation between Gandhi andNehru, ahimsa and violence, and the village economy and state-driven moderniza-tion.

67 Chatterjee, 92.

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68 As Parekh says, during his agitation for independence “Gandhi also introducedthe highly controversial method of fasting. It is not entirely clear whether heclassified it as satyagraha. He rarely referred to it as one, although it probablysatisfied all the relevant criteria” (159).

69 Bhattacharya, 365.70 Bhattacharya, 365; author’s ellipses.71 Chatterjee, 123–24.72 Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” (1919), in From Max Weber: Essays in

Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford Univ.Press, 1946), 121, 124.

73 See Jha, 170; Bhattacharya, quoted in Dorothy Blair Shimer, BhabaniBhattacharya (Boston: Twayne, 1975), 83.

74 Arun Joshi, The Apprentice (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1974), 83.75 Joshi, 40.76 Joshi, 204.77 K. D. Verma, “Alienation, Identity and Structure in Arun Joshi’s The Appren-

tice,” in The Indian Imagination: Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English (NewYork: St. Martin’s, 2000), 197, 200.

78 Dorothy Blair Shimer, “Gandhian Influences on the Writing of BhabaniBhattacharya,” in Perspectives on Bhabani Bhattacharya, ed. Ramesh K. Srivastava(Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan, 1982), 25.

79 Joshi, 208.80 M. Keith Booker, “Midnight’s Children, History, and Complexity: Reading

Rushdie after the Cold War,” in Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, 286, 297.81 Nandy, “Cultural Frames,” 244.82 Brennan, 84, 27; James Harrison, Salman Rushdie (New York: Twayne, 1992),

15.83 Hogan, 522.84 Cronin, “The Indian English Novel: Kim and Midnight’s Children,” Modern

Fiction Studies 33 (1987): 138.85 Mukherjee, “The Anxiety of Indianness,” 176.86 Kumkum Sangari, Politics of the Possible (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000), 23.87 Kaul, 55.88 Ghosh, 149.89 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (1909), in The Collected Works, 10:269.90 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983), 169.91 Hogan, 521, 522.92 Ahmad, 184.93 Anderson, 44.94 Harrison, 58.95 David Lipscomb, “Caught in a Strange Middle Ground: Contesting History in

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” Diaspora 1 (1991): 176.96 Brennan, 98.97 Farhad B. Idris largely concurs with this model of Rushdie as a narrator of

money-driven cynicism, arguing that The Moor’s Last Sigh is a Fanonesque critiqueof a comprador bourgeoisie, a venal class which is “self-serving with an overtnessunmatched in Europe . . . not even bother[ing] to pay lip service to the Enlightenmentprinciple of equality” (“The Moor’s Last Sigh and India’s National Bourgeoisie: ReadingRushdie through Frantz Fanon,” in Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, 158).


98 Brennan is ultimately correct to argue that Midnight’s Children leaves us with avision of globalizing capitalism instead of the tolerant inclusiveness of the Indiannation-state. However, clearly Rushdie is far more committed to the idea (or at thevery least, the memory) of this democratic India than Brennan allows for. Moreover,the history of India since 1947 is not one of mere neocolonial exploitation—it isnever clear that Saleem is really a collaborator with foreign interests, as Brennanclaims (86). In my view, it is important to take an India-specific intranationalapproach to Midnight’s Children’s socioeconomics before one jumps to the interna-tional level. In fact, Brennan’s reading is not really Marxist, but rather based on aworld-system economic model that departs from Marxism in significant ways, mostnotably in its emphasis on the transfer of economic surpluses between spatial regionsinstead of social classes: Third-World governments are in power only to direct anoutflow of national wealth to the Western core powers. As Ian Roxborough observes,this world-system model, with its vision of “a series of metropolis-satellite linksstretching from the Bolivian peasant in an unbroken chain to the rich New Yorkcapitalist,” risks becoming what one might call a synchronic teleology, using imagerythat “is perhaps most graphically expressed by Jonathan Swift: ‘So, naturalistsobserve, a flea / Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; / And these have smaller fleasto bite ’em, / And so proceed ad infinitum’” (Roxborough, Theories of Underdevelop-ment [Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979], 45). Brennan’smodel of Midnight’s Children’s “literary hierarchy” (109) has a similar structure: theworking-class Padma is deceived by the bourgeois Saleem; Saleem’s narrative issubverted by Rushdie himself, the critic of the “nationalist demagogy of a caste ofdomestic sell-outs and power-brokers” whose nonlinear national narrative “create[s]a skepticism necessary for guarding against the mendacities, not only of governmentcommuniqués, but of his own fiction” (98); and finally, Rushdie, writing from a“European perch” that distances him from “the sacrifices and organisational drudg-ery of actual resistance movements,” is himself compromised by the fact that hisfiction is intended for consumers in the Western metropole (27).

In my view, Brennan’s mistake is to assume that capitalism in a Third-Worldcontext necessarily involves a national submission to Western control. In fact, asAhmad observes, India’s very status as a Third-World country can be questioned:“[T]he India of today has all the characteristics of a capitalist country: generalizedcommodity production, vigorous and escalating exchanges not only between agricul-ture and industry but also between Departments I and II of industry itself, andtechnical personnel more numerous than those of France and Germany combined.It is a very miserable kind of capitalism. . . . But India’s steel industry did celebrateits hundredth anniversary a few years ago, and the top eight of her multinationalcorporations are among the fastest-growing in the world, active as they are innumerous countries, from Vietnam to Nigeria. . . . [A] bourgeois political subjectivityhas been created for the populace at large. . . . So—does India belong in the FirstWorld or the Third?” (Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures [New York:Verso, 1992], 100–1). Midnight’s Children asks the same question. Saleem may jokethat after independence, “[t]he businessmen of India were turning white” (212), butthere is no sustained critique of neocolonial exploitation, as there is in a writer likeNgugi wa Thiong’o: indeed, Midnight’s Children often valorizes entrepreneurialbusiness. The businessmen and businessmen’s sons that Saleem grows up with onMethwold’s Estate are not in service to foreign investors but are self-made men, likeSaleem’s “adoptive” father Ahmed Sinai. Rushdie even portrays a homegrown Indian

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capitalism as strong enough to play a colonial role with respect to other countries:“So here is old man Ibrahim, dying with worry because, back in Africa, governmentsare nationalizing his sisal plantations” (151). Although Rushdie’s deconstruction ofSaleem’s privileged position is clearly intentional and hints at Marxist sympathies, healso sees native Indian business as a source of national strength, and members of thebourgeoisie are capable of having genuine political idealism. Overall, the purpose ofthis essay is not to rebut Brennan’s analysis, but rather to supplement it; I am tryingto provide a more nuanced analysis of Saleem’s class position that accounts for hispublic ideals. While Brennan reads Midnight’s Children as a state lie from the firstpage, I see a shift occurring: initially valorizing a public sphere of rational debate,Saleem ends his memoir with a vision of unbridled liberal commerce.

99 Habermas, 27–28.100 Generally, critics do not point out a convergence between Anderson’s and

Habermas’s theories, perhaps because the idea of Englishmen engaging in rationalprinted debated with other Englishmen over matters of general interest would robHabermas’s theory of its Enlightenment emphasis on “human beings pure andsimple” (56) and Anderson’s theory of its Marxist emphasis on nationalism as anirrational false consciousness. Yet the theories of the public sphere and the imaginedcommunity clearly go together (see Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic[Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990], 63). Habermas’s public sphere is undergirdedby what Anderson calls print-capitalism: the commodification of printed materialliberated it from the control of church and state (see Habermas, 36). A corollary ofthis is that English or French, as a printed vernacular, came to exist “below Latin” asa specifically national language (Anderson, 44). For Habermas, what is at issue iswhether a national language can be used for critical discussion, or whether it is putin the service of culture consumption and administered publicity. (Significantly,Anderson sees the dissemination of printed material as an opportunistic commercialventure from the beginning, in the fifteenth century [38], while Habermas claimsthat eighteenth-century newspaper publishers made their calculations “in accordwith the principle of a modest maximization of profit” and often lost money [181–82]; it is only in the nineteenth century that the newspaper becomes a big-businessenterprise and journalism as a form of civic virtue is subordinated to the goal ofaccumulation.)

101 Habermas, 85, 172, 162.102 Habermas, 7.103 Although Rushdie’s endorsement of childhood might sound like a Romantic

view, J. H. Plumb observes that a new valorization of the child may simply be linkedto modernity and middle-class culture in general, as much a part of Locke’s thoughtas of Rousseau’s. Locke’s progressive views on education and child-rearing were“ahead of his time, but in no way original. . . . After Locke the education of the childincreasingly becomes social rather than religious” (“Commercialization and Society,”in The Birth of a Consumer Society, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and Plumb[London: Europa, 1982], 290). This social education was accompanied by a generalgrowth in print media and commodities for children. The emphasis on childhood asa distinct phase of life is a central feature of bourgeois culture and, as we have seen,Saleem’s conception of the Indian public sphere grows directly out of the setting ofhis childhood.

104 Chatterjee, 160; Gorra, 148.105 See May, 261.


106 Neil ten Kortenaar, “Midnight’s Children and the Allegory of History,” Ariel26:2 (1995): 58; see Gorra, 148.

107 Kathryn Hume, “Taking a Stand While Lacking a Center: Rushdie’s PostmodernPolitics,” Philological Quarterly 74 (1995): 210, 213.

108 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique ofActually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. CraigCalhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 118. Fraser observes that, as an “informallymobilized body of nongovernmental discursive opinion,” the bourgeois publicsphere is authentic only insofar as it separates itself from practical political action:“[I]t is precisely this extragovernmental character . . . that confers an aura ofindependence, autonomy, and legitimacy on the ‘public opinion’ generated in it”(134). For Saleem, also, social inaction seems to be a precondition of the MCC’slegitimacy.

109 Pantham, “Beyond Liberal Democracy: Thinking with Mahatma Gandhi,” inPolitical Thought in Modern India, 340.

110 Chatterjee, 107.111 Hogan, 520.112 Pantham, “Habermas’ Practical Discourse,” 292.113 Jawaharlal Nehru, “Tryst with Destiny,” in The Vintage Book of Indian Writing,

3.114 Christian Thorne, “Thumbing Our Nose at the Public Sphere: Satire, the

Market, and the Invention of Literature,” PMLA 116 (2001): 542.115 Habermas, 87.116 Rushdie, “Midnight’s Children and Shame: An Interview,” Kunapipi 7.1 (1985):

17.117 Critics are divided on Rushdie’s attitude toward communism, with Kortenaar

claiming that Rushdie is sympathetic to one of Saleem’s would-be fathers, NadirKhan, “the impotent idealist and later Communist” (38) and Booker arguing that hemocks Nadir and treats communism “essentially as a joke” (302). Rushdie’s attitudetoward communism is illuminated by the portrayal of Picture Singh: he sympathizeswith its social vision, but feels that it will become an oppressive political machinery inpractice. Indeed, in The Jaguar Smile Rushdie offers a sort of postscript to the PictureSingh/magicians’ ghetto section of Midnight’s Children: in revolutionary Nicaragua,the magicians have actually come to power. “[India], to most Nicaraguans . . .seemed an exotic, camelious, elephantine place; they were amazed when I drewparallels between that fantasyland and their own country. And yet those parallels didexist. The three tendencies of the FSLN, for example, echoed the divisions andarguments in the Indian left, and in many other poor countries of the South” (TheJaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey [London: Pan Books, 1987], 167). DespiteRushdie’s general support for a government that had “come to power through theballot box”—“if Nicaragua was a Soviet-style state, I was a monkey’s uncle” (162)—he nevertheless expresses a consistent fear that the Nicaraguan government willitself turn out to be repressive. For example, he suggests that the suppression of aright-wing newspaper has an “Orwellian resonance” (47), and says the Sandinistas“were, in a way, elitists . . . [believing] that only those who had passed through thefire [of revolution] were fitted to rule” (162). The elitism parallels Picture Singh’sdeclaration that “here is the truth of the business: some persons are better, othersare less” (475). Rushdie ends his account of the new state with a monitoryspeculation: the popular limerick about the young girl riding a jaguar may be read

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symbolically as Nicaragua trying to tame the imperialist United States, or as theNicaraguan people in danger from the ambitions of the FSLN: “[W]hat if the younggirl were Nicaragua itself, and the jaguar was the revolution? Eh? What about that?”(161). For Rushdie, organized political action always seems to resolve itself into aform of oppressive control; hence, communism can be entertained as a subject ofdebate, but never implemented as social policy. In sum, given Rushdie’s laceratingskepticism toward concrete group action, it is perhaps inevitable that Midnight’sChildren’s conclusion leaves us with economic expansion and a public vacuum: themass-produced, commercial world that always underlay Saleem’s childhood privilegeis the world that he returns to.

118 Raghavan Iyer, quoted in Dallmayr, “Gandhi as Mediator between East andWest,” Margins of Political Discourse (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1989),28.

119 Nandy, “Oppression and Human Liberation: Towards a Post-Gandhian Uto-pia,” in Political Thought in Modern India, 353.

120 Habermas, 195.121 Booker, 305.122 “Rushdie clearly favors democracy over oligarchy—but what exactly are his

views on the economic system?” Hogan asks rhetorically (512). It seems to me thatRushdie’s attitude toward the intersection of politics and economics is ultimatelymore Weberian than Marxist or Foucauldian: the world of politics is far darker thanthat of the marketplace, which may often be corrupt but at least allows some roomfor individual freedom. There has been a recent trend to portray Rushdie as a criticof business, but the enemy is always, first and foremost, big government. Forexample, Almond says that The Satanic Verses “bundl[es] capitalism together withfaith and nationalism as three belief systems which move into action when peoplelose the will to think for themselves. . . . If, in his essay [‘In God We Trust’], Rushdiepaints a backward-looking Islam which can’t keep up with the pace of modernity, inThe Satanic Verses we encounter a radically dynamic prophet [Mahound] whoseems, on the contrary, to be epitomizing modernity all too well, restructuring aprimitive and feudal Jahilia into something along the lines of a business corporation”(“Mullahs, Mystics, Moderates and Moghuls: The Many Islams of Salman Rushdie,”ELH 70 [2003]: 1141–42). But Almond has gotten it exactly reversed: Jahilia is betteroff in the beginning of the novel as a business concern. Settled by “shrewdbusinessmen” (“Now the sand serves the mighty urban merchants”), pre-IslamJahilia is liberal and ecumenical: “O the splendour of the fairgrounds of Jahilia! Herein vast scented tents are arrays of spices, of senna leaves, of fragrant woods; here theperfume vendors can be found, competing for the pilgrims’ noses, and for theirwallets, too. . . . Merchants, Jewish, Monophysite, Nabataean, buy and sell pieces ofsilver and gold. . . . Poets stand on boxes and declaim while pilgrims throw coins attheir feet” (Rushdie, The Satanic Verses [New York: Viking, 1989], 94, 96). Incontrast, by the end of the novel “Mahound’s arm had grown long; his power hadencircled Jahilia, cutting off its life-blood, its pilgrims and caravans. The fairs ofJahilia, these days, were pitiful to behold” (360). Then follows a confrontationbetween Mahound’s intrusive statist regime, with its censors and “vice-squadofficer[s]” (389), and the entrepreneurial brothel-keeper, whose resistance Rushdieclearly valorizes (“[T]he men of Jahilia flocked to The Curtain, which experienced athree hundred per cent increase in business. . . . There were more ways than one ofrefusing to Submit” [381]). In short, in The Satanic Verses the language of “market


values, corporate decisions, believers as consumers” seems to have a liberatingpotential (Almond, 1141). Even the later The Moor’s Last Sigh, which attacksbusiness corruption and has an entrepreneur as a central villain, is not thestraightforward Fanonesque denunciation of a comprador bourgeoisie that Idristhinks it is. The book’s most moving declaration of the ideal of social justice is put inthe mouth of the spice merchant Camoens da Gama, who, like Saleem, is more of ahopeless idealist than an exploiting imperialist (Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh[London: Jonathan Cape, 1995], 51). Further, although analysts like Ahmad haveemphasized that contemporary far-right Hinduist organizations like the RSS do notpresent any kind of nationalist resistance to neocolonialism, but in fact accommodatethemselves to big business and foreign investment (see Lineages of the Present),Rushdie interestingly sets the entrepreneur Abraham Zogoiby and the Mumbai Axisleader Raman (“Mainduck”) Fielding in opposition to each other. The point seems tobe not that business civilization is thoroughly rotten (as “that alphabet soup of[fundamentalist] authoritarians” clearly is [337]), but rather that business leadershave abandoned liberal bourgeois ideals, which leads to an ironic reversal ofCamoens’s vision of a secular and tolerant India: “Yes, the High Command did exist,and the Muslim gangs had been united by a Cochin Jew. . . . It occurred to me thatmy father’s pre-eminence over Scar and his colleagues was a dark, ironic victory forIndia’s deep-rooted secularism. The very nature of this inter-community league ofcynical self-interest gave the lie to Mainduck’s vision of a theocracy in which oneparticular variant of Hinduism would rule” (331–32). The politics of The Moor’s LastSigh are complex, but the book seems to continue Midnight’s Children’s valorizationof high bourgeois culture in Bombay (now Mumbai), especially in its admiringdepiction of the wealthy artist Aurora da Gama.

123 Rushdie, “Introduction,” viii.124 Rushdie, “Introduction,” xi.125 See Rushdie, “Introduction,” x.126 Ahmad, 212.127 Ahmad, 182; Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 32.128 Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 279.

Gandhian Communalism and the Midnight Children's Conference

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