Memory, History and Identitary Fictions in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Abstract

Rewriting the personal, national, religious, artistic and linguistic self of its character-cum-author, Saleem Sinai, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children offers the reader a trip down memory lane, to a past which refuses to conform to fact, truth, logic or chronology. This past is moulded into numerous his-stories and cured of its factuality with the aid of the magic-realist processing grid. The whole novel is rich in extra-ordinary scenes and defamiliarising practices; selected here however, for illustrative and argumentative purposes, is the open ending which advances the intriguing image of history as a pantry shelf packed with jars of pickled memories.