Analysis of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children employs strategies that engage in the exploration of history, nationalism, and hybridity. This essay will examine three passages in the novel that demonstrate these problems. Additionally, it will explore why each passage is a good demonstration of these issues, how these issues apply to India in the novel, and how the novel critiques these concepts. The passage from pages 37-38 effectively demonstrates the concept of history, as it brings to the foreground elements important to this issue. Rushdie challenges conventional modes of story through his self-reflexive narrative structure. The passage is a good demonstration of his argument as it illustrates the problems of rewriting history. His writing attempts to encourage the reader to reconsider the valid interpretation of his story. Saleem writes "please believe I'm falling apart", as he begins "to break like an old jug", illustrating a sense of fragmentation in his story. This parallels the narrative structure of the novel in that it is circular, discontinuous and digressive. This fragmentation appropriates the concept of history, developed by the colonizers. History works for a particular class of ideology, and therefore will be tainted, oblique and subjective. The “fiction” of history is based on the simple assumption that life has the form of a story. For Saleem, who is “whipped by too much history,” it is his memory that creates his story. “Memory, like the fruit, is saved from the corruption of clocks.” This is reflected in the concepts of time and place. However, for Rushdie, it is not based on the universal empty time conceptualized by the colonizers. Notions of time and space are integrated into his story. The novel criticizes the concepts of history by challenging traditional conventions. Rushdie uses unreliable events to subvert official notions of history. For example, in his description of the Amrister massacre, he describes the troops firing into the crowd as white, when they were not. He does this perhaps to illustrate how much history is based on interpretation and ideology. It also illustrates how facts (written as history) do not take into account different notions of space and time. For example, in the past... middle of the paper... his biological father is a departing settler. The passage on page 211 clearly demonstrates Saleem's hybrid identity. It relates hybridity to history by implying the heterogeneity of memory. “The truth of memory because memory has its own special type”. For Saleem, his memory provides a search for truth, rather than many truths. Saleem links his hybrid story to “chutney” which illustrates the sign of a mixed identity. “Green chutney on chilli pakora,” this image of chutney runs throughout the novel and aids Saleem's story. Next, he uses this image to summarize his hybrid culture, which parallels the “chutnification of history” and the “pickling of time.” Rushdie comments on the colonized by imitating the colonizer. Two stories emerged together, full of contamination as mimicry becomes a problem as it disrupts power. This reflects what Rushdie calls “chutney,” a mixture of history and nationalism that becomes so thick and entangled that it transforms to create a new culture. Rushdie effectively addresses postcolonial studies issues of history, nationalism, and hybridity, and Midnight's Children illustrates and challenges these concepts.