Topographies of Nationalism in Midnight's Children

This paper investigates Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children in the context of nationalism studies, mainly the works of Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner and Tom Nairn, and Indian historiography, as it is defined by Partha Chatterjee, Nicole Weickgenannt Thiara and Pranav Jani, among other critics. Focusing on the spatial rhetoric that the allegories of Indiaproduce, I argue that the novel offers two antithetical images of nationhood: whereas the main character's body mirrors the Nehruvian ideal of the secular and modern nation, theMidnight Children's Conference, located in Saleem Sinai's head, embodies its spiritual, magical aspects. Therefore, the allegories offer a contrast between the inner, spiritualdimension of nationhood and the open, public domain of the official national rhetoric,suggesting that Midnight's Children does not simply reproduce the concept of the modernnation, as a number of critics claim, but depicts it as an entity split between the public and the private.