Table of Contents:-
Personal Information
Assignment Details
Abstract
Keywords
About the Author – Salman Rushdie
About the Novel – Midnight’s Children
Introduction: Handcuffed to History
Context and the Post-Independence Project
Thesis: Subverting Chronos via Circularity
Time and the Abdication of Chronos
Synchronization and the Burden of Destiny
Engaging Aporetic Time: Linearity, Cyclicality, and Timelessness
Starting Thirty-Two Years Before: The Inescapable Past
History, Metafiction, and Unreliable Narration
Historiographic Metafiction: Blending Fact and Fantasy
Unreliability as a Political Act: Challenging Official Records
Fragmentation and the Allegory of the Cracking Body
Circular Narration and the Preservation of Memory
The Sternean Narrative Frame and Prolepsis
Recursion and the Repetition of Failure
The Metaphor of the Pickle Jar: Preserving Subjective History
Conclusion: Storytelling as Mastery over Time
References
Personal Information:
Name:- Trupti Hadiya
Batch:- M.A. Sem 3 (2024-2026)
Enrollment Number:- 5108240013
E-mail Address:- hadiyatrupti55@gmail.com
Roll Number:- 31
Assignment Details:-
Topic: Time, History, and Circular Narration in Midnight’s Children
Paper & subject code:- 22407 Paper 202: Indian English Literature – Post-Independence
Submitted to:- Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar
Date of Submission:- 10 November 2025
Abstract
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a landmark postcolonial novel that fundamentally reconfigures the relationship between the individual and the grand narrative of the nation. This paper establishes that the novel’s central project is achieved through a radical critique of linear time (Chronos), which Rushdie accomplishes by employing aporetic temporal models and a circular narrative structure. Through the voice of the unreliable narrator, Saleem Sinai, the text deconstructs the objective claims of Western historiography, arguing that the nation’s past (History) is a subjective blend of myth, memory, and recurring failures. By demonstrating the simultaneous existence of cyclical, linear, and timeless elements in its structure—a concept termed aporetic time—the novel achieves the "abdication of Chronos", asserting the imaginative power of storytelling over the rigid chronology of the state.
Keywords
Time and History, Circular Narration, Aporetic Time, Abdication of Chronos, Historiographic Metafiction, Magical Realism, Saleem Sinai, Unreliable Narrator, Fragmentation, Post-Independence Indian Literature.
Time, History, and Circular Narration in Midnight’s Children
About the Author – Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie (born June 19, 1947, in Bombay, now Mumbai) is one of the most prominent voices in postcolonial literature. An Indian-British novelist and essayist, he is best known for blending history, politics, and magical realism to explore themes of identity, migration, and nationhood. His groundbreaking novel Midnight’s Children (1981) won the Booker Prize and established him as a major literary figure for its innovative narrative style and reimagining of India’s history. Rushdie’s other notable works include Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses (1988), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), and Joseph Anton (2012). His writing often challenges colonial narratives and celebrates hybridity — the coexistence of multiple cultures, languages, and histories within modern identity.
About the Novel – Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) is a landmark postcolonial novel that intertwines personal and national history through the life of Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment of India’s independence. Blending magical realism with political history, the novel traces India’s journey from colonial rule to partition and beyond. Its non-linear, circular narrative structure reflects the chaos and continuity of Indian history, questioning the reliability of memory and storytelling. Winner of the Booker Prize (1981) and Booker of Bookers (1993), it remains a defining work in Indian English literature for its exploration of time, identity, and nationhood.
1. Introduction: Handcuffed to History
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, published in 1981, is one of the most significant literary interventions in Post-Independence Indian English Literature, directly engaging with the monumental task of recording the new nation's complex history. The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, embodies this burden, claiming to be "mysteriously handcuffed to history" by virtue of being born at the precise stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947. His life becomes an allegory for the nation, with his physical and emotional states mirroring India’s political trajectory, establishing an inescapable synchronization between personal Time and national History.
The novel’s narrative technique—its complex, recursive, and often contradictory structure—is the primary tool used to subvert the linear historical record. This paper argues that Rushdie employs circular narration to achieve an "abdication of Chronos," which is the deliberate rejection of objective, linear time as the sole means of recounting history. By embracing a mode of aporetic time, where competing temporal frameworks like the linear, the cyclical, and the subjective coexist in irresolvable tension, Rushdie proposes that postcolonial "Hi(s)tory" is fragmented, subjective, and perpetually dependent on the consciousness of the storyteller. The novel thus asserts the power of fiction to challenge and rewrite the authoritative historical record.
2. Time and the Abdication of Chronos
The novel’s treatment of Time is overtly aggressive, marked by Saleem’s frantic need to impose his personal rhythm onto the march of history. This technique, described as the "abdication of Chronos," posits that objective time is inadequate for representing the tumultuous postcolonial experience.
2.1. Synchronization and the Burden of Destiny
Saleem’s life is defined by his "clock-ridden birth," which inextricably ties his body and destiny to the nation's political fate. The narrative repeatedly uses the personal to structure the political:
His telepathy, which allows him to convene the Midnight’s Children’s Conference (MCC), corresponds to India’s period of unity and hope in the 1950s.
The literal fragmentation of his body—the loss of hair, the blood transfusion, the cracking skin—directly mirrors the political and geographic fragmentation of India (the loss of Kashmir, the secession of Bangladesh).
His loss of memory (amnesia) during the 1971 war symbolically parallels the nation's conscious or unconscious desire to forget its painful history, only to regain a different sensory perception afterward.
The opening paragraph, starting 32 years before his birth with his grandfather, Aadam Aziz, immediately signals that personal time is subject to a complex inheritance that is far from linear. The past is not simply over; it constantly informs and shapes the present and the future, making Time a "fluid medium" for the culture of metaphors.
2.2. Engaging Aporetic Time
The novel’s rejection of a single, coherent temporal model can be understood through Paul Ricoeur’s theory of aporetic time. Ricoeur argues that every framework of time (cyclical, linear, or subjective) contains unresolvable tensions or "blind spots" (aporias).
Linearity (Chronos): Represented by the clock striking midnight, the official start of independence, and the dates of wars.
Cyclical Time: Evident in the recurrence of family and national patterns—from Aadam Aziz’s loss of faith to Saleem’s loss of memory, and the repetition of violence and political tyranny.
Timelessness (Subjective Time): Captured in Saleem’s amnesia, his magical ability to transcend space and time, and the very act of storytelling itself, which exists in a continuous "eternal present" of narration.
By refusing to subordinate one temporal mode to another, Rushdie forces the reader to confront the contradictory nature of history, positioning the narrative itself as the only way to productively engage these tensions.
3. History, Fragmentation, and Unreliable Narration
Midnight’s Children is an exemplar of Historiographic Metafiction, a literary mode that blends fantastical elements with actual historical events to critique the nature of history itself.
3.1. The Challenge to Official History
Saleem’s narrative is a conscious attempt to replace the official, detached state history with a version that is "more real" because it is emotionally and magically felt. Rushdie takes historical occurrences—from the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy to the various Indo-Pak conflicts and Indira Gandhi’s Emergency—and filters them through Saleem’s subjective experience. Saleem's claim to be the cause of historical events (e.g., his illness preceding the 1965 war, his nose-operation preceding the loss of telepathy) is a narcissistic assertion of the individual’s centrality to the historical process, directly countering the state’s tendency to minimize individual suffering under grand political narratives. The history narrated is therefore a messy, biased, but ultimately more truthful "hi(s)tory."
3.2. Unreliability as Political Act
Saleem's constant self-correction and admission of errors (such as placing the Emergency in 1971 instead of 1975 to suit his story) reveals the narrator's unreliability. However, this unreliability is not a weakness; it is a profound political and literary statement.
By acknowledging his "literary lies," Saleem highlights that all history is a form of unreliable narrative, a fabrication curated by the dominant voice.
His distortions become a postcolonial challenge to the Western, objective model of history, arguing that the chaotic, multi-voiced reality of India can only be captured through a fragmented, magical, and occasionally inaccurate lens. The gaps and contradictions in the narrative are the aporias that testify to the impossibility of a seamless, singular truth.
4. Circular Narration and the Preservation of Memory
The novel's circular and recursive narrative is the structural engine that enforces the idea of cyclical time and allows for the preservation of subjective memory.
4.1. The Sternean Frame and Prolepsis
The novel utilizes a distinctive narrative frame, borrowing from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Saleem is writing his memoir to Padma in the present, continually referring back to this moment of narration. This is an attempt to defeat Chronos by delaying the inevitable narrative closure—Saleem's death.
This is structurally realized through prolepsis, the technique of foreshadowing future events and constantly looping back to the present. Saleem frequently interrupts his story to say, "But I mustn't get ahead of myself..." or "I shall return to that later..." This creates a narrative circularity where the beginning, middle, and end are constantly overlapping and referencing each other, defying the traditional trajectory of the Western novel. The past is thus always foreshadowing the present, suggesting that historical patterns are fated to repeat.
4.2. The Metaphor of the Pickle Jar
The metaphor of pickling is the ultimate structural and thematic expression of the circular, anti-linear narrative. Saleem is writing his life story in a pickle factory, describing his chapters as "pickle-jars".
Preservation (Time): Pickling is a way to stop the decay of time and preserve fragments of experience indefinitely. By filling his jars with his life's story, Saleem is literally trying to immortalize his subjective history.
Fragmentation (Structure): Each pickle jar represents a chapter, a contained, distinct fragment of time and memory. The overall narrative is the collection of these disparate fragments, demonstrating that truth is not a seamless whole but a mosaic of preserved, subjective moments.
The Medium (Metaphor): The idea that time can be "captured" and "preserved" in physical objects (pickle-jars, embroidery, film) proves that Rushdie believes the narrative itself is a vital, synthetic art form capable of encapsulating reality. The single empty jar that remains at the end acknowledges the impossibility of complete closure and the perpetual nature of storytelling.
Conclusion :
Midnight’s Children is an essential text of post-Independence Indian literature because it moves beyond merely recording history to fundamentally questioning its very construction. Through the character of Saleem Sinai, Rushdie orchestrates the "abdication of Chronos," replacing the authority of linear history with the subversive power of subjective memory and magical invention.
The novel's circular narration and its embrace of aporetic temporal frameworks ultimately prove that the only way to capture the chaotic, paradoxical, and multi-layered truth of the postcolonial Indian experience is through a narrative that is equally fragmented, unreliable, and self-referential. Saleem Sinai, the "victim" of his time, becomes its "master" through the act of storytelling, ensuring that his personal, fractured history is preserved, like chutney, for future generations.
References:
Buchholz, Laura. “Unnatural Narrative in Postcolonial Contexts: Re-Reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 42, no. 3, 2012, pp. 332–51. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24484776. Accessed 3 Nov. 2025.
Dhar, T. N. “Problematizing History with Rushdie in Midnight’s Children.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 28, no. 1/2, 1993, pp. 93–111. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40873307. Accessed 3 Nov. 2025.
Hawes, Clement. “Leading History by the Nose: The Turn to the Eighteenth Century in Midnight’s Children.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 39, no. 1, 1993, pp. 147–68. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26284401. Accessed 3 Nov. 2025.
O’Brien, Sean P. “‘Both Masters and Victims of Their Times’: Engaging Aporetic Time in Midnight’s Children.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 50, no. 2, May 2014, pp. 164–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989414533688.
Ravillon, Stéphanie. “The Abdication of Chronos: The Representation of Time in Salman Rushdie’s Novels.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, Jan. 2002, pp. 59–68. https://doi.org/10.4000/1248c.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. Vintage, 1995. Accessed 3 Nov. 2025.
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