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영어

In Midnight's Children(l981), Ahmed Salman Rushdie represents the complex condition, the aftermath of colonial condition in India. At that time, Indian people desire to forget the colonial past and to build a new postcolonial identity or nation. In this decolonising process, the anti-colonial nationalism or fundamentalism are emerged in India. They reject all the British colonial influences and admit the Indian culture before the British colonial occupation as the only pure native culture. The emergence of anti-colonial and ethnic nation after colonialism is frequently accompanied by a desire to forget the colonial past. This will-to-forget, that is postcolonial amnesia, is the symptom of the urge for historical self-invention or the need to make a new start. But the mere repression of colonial memories is never emancipation from the colonial subordination. For the real decolonising, postcolonial subjects have to do the task of revisiting, remembering and interrogating the colonial past. Saleem Sinai, a narrator in Midnight's Children, is an allegory of the nation of India. His biography runs parallel to the Indian history. In Midnight's Children, Rushdie interrogates the British colonizer who conducted the overwhelming and lasting violence of colonization, and rethinks the Indian colonized who conspired with the colonial ruling. Rushdie thinks the British colonizer were failed because they enforced only their traditions and customs on India. And anti-colonial nationalism and fundamentalism in India were failed too, because they rejected all the British colonial influences and admitted their homogenized religion and culture as the only pure one. In Midnight's Children, Rushdie thus offers multiculturalism as a real decolonising device for Indian postcolonial subjects.