Salman Rushdie: The Postcolonial and The Global

Abstract

Salman Rushdie is a pioneer among postcolonial authors, whose novels enter the debates around postcolonial theories. My thesis is an analysis of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980) and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) for the representation of postcolonial India. I employ the Jameson-Ahmad debate, a famous debate around postcolonial literature and national allegories, in this thesis. This paper analyses postcolonial themes of otherness, Hybridity and gender which are employed in these two texts as a way of postcolonial nation to assert its identity through literature. Along with highlighting otherness of the postcolonial identity, the texts enter into a discourse of Hybridity as the identities in postcolonial fiction are evolving from distinct and essentialized to hybrid identities. A focus on gender is given in the final chapter of this paper while analyzing the themes of othering, essentialization and Hybridity as illustrated through the characterizations of female characters in Midnight’s Children and The Ground Beneath Her Feet.