This study examines Salman Rushdie¡¯s Midnight¡¯s Children and E. M.

Forster¡¯s
A Passage to India in the perspective of postcolonialism. It argues that
Rushdie's novel is a rewriting of A Passage to India, an attempt to challenge
and subvert Forster's representation of India. Although A Passage to India
offers a valuable critique of European imperialism and suggests the possibility
of friendship between the English and the Indians, it is not free from the
dominant colonial ideology. Set in post-independent India, Midnight¡¯s Children
appropriates characters, main events, historical backgrounds from A Passage to
India and rewrites the colonial history of India and the colonial discourse
inscribed in the novel.
Both Forster and Rushdie reject an attempt to understand India as a fixed
entity comprehensible as a whole. Tracing the colonial desire to see the real
India, Forster suggests that it is destined to fail to generalize India as an
imperial subject. Such colonial desire in Midnight¡¯s Children is presented in
the form of the violence of nationalism which pursues a national community
completely unified. Using various narrative strategies that highlight the
contingency of historical events, Rushdie discloses the fictional and
constructed nature of the notion of a nation--a mere ¡°imagined community.¡±
In A Passage to India and Midnight¡¯s Children, a fantastic experience
serves to emphasize the failure of imperial and nationalistic ideology to
generalize and idealize India. Forster critiques the colonial desire to see the
real India in imaginary experiences in Marabar Caves, whereas Rushdie, rewriting
the Marabar Caves anecdote, has Saleem realize the falsehood of nationalism in
the jungle of Sundarbans. The purpose and effect of fantasy, however, is not
identical in two novels. The Caves episode reiterates the irreconciliability
between the English and the Indians and moves historical India into the realm of
a ¡°mystery.¡± In contrast, the fantastic experience in Sundarbans helps to
restore and reinforce the reality of India.
The intertextuality between the two novels is also found in different ways
in which sexuality is dealt with. Sexuality, concealed and fictionalized in A
Passage to India, is overtly presented as a means of resistance in Midnight¡¯s
Children. Foster rejects ¡°the colonial discourse of rape¡± but fails to affirm
the potential of sexuality as Indian resistance to colonial domination.
Midnight¡¯s Children appropriates the same colonial discourse and foregrounds
sexuality to highlight its resistant and subversive potential against the legacy
of colonialism and the ideological violence of nationalism.
Midnight¡¯s Children powerfully subverts the hegemonic discourse of European
imperialism, but reveals its own limitations. Indian women, marginalized in
Rushdie¡¯s revision of the colonial discourse, for example, underlines the fact
that his work should also be rewritten continuously, just as the last pickle jar
left empty by Saleem should be filled by next generations. The concept of
infinite rewriting dictates the constant interrogating and dismantling of the
dominant narrative and ideology. To resist the new forms of colonialism, more
subtle and sophisticated, in the contemporary world, Rushdie's project of
rewriting colonial history, if with its own limitations, is to be continued.

* Note: The text above is the abstract of the thesis.

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