Midnights Children as a National Allegory

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The New Wave: The Indian writing in English has been weighed by the responsibility of narrating the nation, re-presenting India in all post-colonial contexts. J.Mee sees the rewriting of modernIndian history and ''the question of who constitutes nation" as a common concern of recent Indian novels and recent Indian historiography. Indian historiography and the Indian novel can be seen as complementary genres and the historian and the narrator as complementary to each other. Unlike the history historians write, fiction writers write about the human history. So history intersects with private life and there is no distinction between the private and public life. A nation does not exist as a physical entity, but lives by and speaks through the culture soul. The trend of historiography writing began with Salman Rushdie in his second novel Midnight's Children (1981) and writers like Amitav Ghosh, Rohinten Mistry and Vikram Seth followed. Rushdie remarks that ''everything has to do with politics and with the relationship of individual and history.'' He connects the individual component of the society with the collective stream of history and nation. With Rushdie, history as arranged in time and space or with facts and figures is ''abstracted, modified, enriched and made realistic through portrayal of the corresponding setting and psyche of the human world.'' Historiographic Metafiction: Linda Hutcheon groups Midnight's Children among the representatives of what she calls ''historiographic metafiction.'' Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically drawsattention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. According to Hutcheon, it ''attempts to demarginalize the literary through confrontation with the historical, and it does so both thematically and
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