POST-COLONIAL ASPECTS IN SALMAN RUSHDIE'S NOVELS MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN AND SATANIC VERSES

Abstract

The article discusses the postcolonial aspects of Salman Rushdie's novels "Midnight’s Children" and "The Satanic Verses". Postcolonialist research is broader in its understanding than any other literary discipline. It covers all over the world. In postcolonial studies, the writing centre changed from Europe to the world over.

From the second half of the twentieth century, writers began publishing works influenced by postcolonialism. One of the most significant writers in this field is Salman Rushdie, an Indian-born British writer. His novel Midnight’s Children remains a central text in postcolonial literature. Rushdie’s ambitious novel rejects the British version of India and tries to show the reader the history of India directly from the position of a conquered country. Rushdie is, to some extent, trying to rewrite history.

In "Midnight’s Children", magical and real stories intertwine. The narrative is chaotic; the events of the past and present are interwoven. As Rushdie says, in the process of writing, he saw how to drag in everything from the ancient traditions of India to the oral narrative form to, above all, the noise and the music of the Indian city.

As a postcolonial author who has experienced the difficulties of migration for himself, Rushdie in his novel The Satanic Verses deals with the issue of migration from India to England and tries to show the reader the difficulties that migrants have to deal with.

In this seemingly magical, unrealistic episode, Rushdie discusses the migrant conditions in England, how their identities have changed under conditions of constant restriction and disenfranchisement. Naturally, the transformation of them into hybrid creatures is also metaphorical and accurately expresses the existence of migrants-half the people left behind.

In parallel with the phantasmagoric adventures of the characters in the novels, Rushdie describes the dual feelings of the people living under the conditions of colonialism-on the one hand, their desire for cultural assimilation, and on the other hand, their desire to preserve their national tradition and culture, their identity.

Keywords:  Postcolonialism, Hybridization, Identity, Rushdie, Salman.