Midnight's Children Analysis

I was born in the city of Bombay… once upon a time. (Rushdie, pg 3)
Proper London, capital of Vilayet, winked blinked nodded in the night. (Rushdie, pg. 4)

To enter the Rushdian post– colonial space, the reader needs to be possessed of a vividly romantic and incisively theoretical imagination, for reading Rushdie is to imagine with him two different sets of post– colonial spaces— the homeland that is imagined through the medium of unreliable memories, and the Vilayet or the land of the white man, which is again, an imagined city of blinking and nodding dreams. In my paper, I have extracted the Bombay out of Midnight’s Children and the London from The Satanic Verses to show how these two imaginary/ real locales become the sites where a post–
Theoretically, the former book foregrounds the latter, and it is through analyzing one with respect to the other, can we completely comprehend the places and the spaces created by and through the colonial metropolis and the colonized metropolis, drawing a continuous line of connection. Bombay, the home, and London, the Vilayet, interpenetrate each other in creating the Saleems, the Chamchas and the Farishtas, and in turn imbibing what each impose upon both places. Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin talk about the diasporic tendency to create, construct and reconstruct identity, not only by identifying with some ancient lost place, but through the very act of travelling. It is through this process that the split in the diasporic consciousness occurs— as Bhabha theorized, from what Davies and Sinfield informs us, there is a desire to remain the same, yet different. In Rushdie, the samenesss is to be drawn from the imaginary homeland, and the difference has to be negotiated in terms of one’s exchange with the Vilayet. Mishra adds that ‘the nation state as an “imagined community” needs diasporas to remind it of what the idea of homeland is.’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin, pg.