The Excremental Vision of the Nation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Salman Rushdie’s novel of postcolonial hope and disenchantment Midnight’s Children is conspicuous in its copious use of scatological imagery and situation. As a governing trope of this novel, excremental images not only serve as an index of the failings of a flawed postcolonial nation but also, in my opinion, as a complex, multivalent sign in the novel’s engagement with the discourses about the nation and national identity. Excrement, the site of what Kristeva calls the abject, occupies the ambiguous zone between the self and the other. When inscribed upon the body of the nation they thus mediate and inform our understanding of the author’s complex ambivalence towards his nation. The in-betweenness of Rushdie's stance vis-à-vis the nation, his simultaneous disenchantment with the actual trajectory of the postcolonial Indian nation and his desperate faith in the resilience of the secular ideal of India thus provide a fertile ground for the reading of the scatological tropes in his novel. This paper aims to envisage an interpretive idiom for reading the use of scatology in Rushdie’s novel thereby not only providing new insights into Rushdie’ craft but also suggesting the efficacy of scatological humour in capturing the complexities of the postcolonial condition.