Postcolonial Literature Coman (Pop)

Anamaria Cristina
anul III LRE

Salman Rushdie- Midnight’s Children (1982)

Excerpt from Book One: The perforated sheet

This fragment reflects the general perception that

the West is advanced and the Orient is regressive up to a
point. The text is a reaction to the effect of decolonization by
bringing the psychological problems of the Indian society in
front of the European public who could not perceive the real
Orient because of the western education and culture.
Dr. Aziz questions his identity of Indian citizen who
studied medicine in Heidelberg. He bears in himself an old
culture by birth, but was educated in Europe and thus his
innate abilities were modeled by the environment he lived in
and by the way he was educated. It is said that a person is
the product of heredity, environment and education. His
drama is not unique. The author illustrates through Aadam
Aziz the drama of all Indian intellectuals who are indebted
both to their origins and to the culture that sharpened their
minds. They grew in innocence until the western gave them
the experience of the world. The inner dilemma is generated
by the conflict between the native values and the new
culture brought by colonizers. After trying to live in the
conditions set up by the Europeans, dr. Aziz has to make an
effort to fit the society he left. In this process he tries to stay
neutral and independent. The decolonization process left in
him the type of a new man: a hybrid of Indian breeding and
European way of thinking.
One of the issues of decolonization was that most
people remained illiterate and could not understand the
progress of medicine. In his practice as doctor, Aziz
confronts the impossibility of restoring the Indian way of
treating ill persons. He is in front of a compromise: the

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perforated sheet. This metaphor could also suggest the fact
that the new knowledge was accepted fragmentarily by the
local people which is a normal process as not everyting
European could be introduced and accepted right away in
country that had another background and traditions. In fact,
not even the perforated sheet should be used. The original
culture is the one that should make some adjustments just
as Aziz’s mother did when her husband suffered a stroke.
Because of a natural accident the household roles were
switched so as the family would continue to exist. Aziz does
not see the exposure of his mother with critical oriental
eyes , he sees the change as a common consequence of a
change which happened first to his nation. He is only
amazed by how quickly his mother changed her attitude
concerning the fact that she lived isolated until that
moment.
An important detail is that Saleem, the narrator was
born on the same date when the Independence of India was
declared, on the 15th of August 1947, “at the precise instant
of India’s arrival at independence”. The birth of a baby
coincides with the birth of a new liberated nation. History
brings changes even in the nature of people. The individual
represents the people as the narrator says: “ Soothsayers
had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival,
politicos ratified my authenticity.” As a newly born, India had
not yet either the power to self determination: “I was
entirely left without a say in the matter”, or the experience
in deciding its own way. On the one hand, the country was
perceived by the world through ‘a perforated sheet’ held by
the former colonizers so as India would not attract so soon
other economical powers to exploit it. The new nation was
soon labeled as “Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Budha
and even Piece-of-the-Moon”, nice nicknames for something
that should appear serious and believable. The prejudices
that accompany the Oriental world are treated by Edward
Said in his book:
"My idea in Orientalism is to use humanistic critique to
open up the fields

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 of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought
and analysis to
replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping
fury that so
imprison us in labels and antagonistic debate whose
goal is a belligerent
collective identity rather than understanding and
intellectual exchange."
(Said)
By telling the story of his grandfather Saleem tries to find his
own answers regarding his identity and the identity of the
country he lives in, things from which he cannot run as he
says: “there’s no getting away from the date”.
On the other hand, the change is obvious to Aziz when
the stranger in him no longer perceives his country as
native, the “frost-hardened tussock” does not touch him
spiritually, the old values begin to perish. The call of the
origins is illustrated by the fact that “the tussock of earth…
was at bottom no more than a catalyst”. The initiation in a
new culture suspends the knowledge acquired before, “he
saw through traveled eyes”. Now, he looked at India with
critical eyes, “instead of beauty” he saw “the narrowness”.
Nature ‘punched’ him to make him fully aware of the change
in himself. “To be at home and feel so utterly enclosed” was
a feeling of the new self. As an individual, Aadam Aziz
enriched his cultural background but he felt ‘enclosed’
because he could no longer communicate to his former self
using the western code. As a consequence, “the old place
resented his educated, stethoscoped return”. In the process
of recapturing the ego of his childhood “he would try and
recall his childhood springs in Paradise”. There is a fight in
the individual between western and eastern values. The
struggle of accepting a new belief in Germany turns into a
struggle of returning to his original one. We could resume
everything to the European manner of trying to set a new
order without selecting the good things of the previous. “The
anarchists” tried to convey Aziz another vision upon himself,
“that he was somehow the invention of their ancestors”. It
seems to me partially true as the Indians tried to model

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themselves after the European way partly because they
were forced to, partly because they wanted to gain a higher
social status. I guess this step had to be made because the
Indians had the right to study in the country of their
colonizers as a kind of reward for letting them use something
which was not actually theirs. The doctor’s return to his
country can be seen as a return in search of the lost
paradise, in a miltonian paraphrase. In his wandering in
Germany he could not find the answers to his questions, a
reason for returning home at the people he thought they
understood him. Tai, the boatman, is seen as the oldest, as if
he existed ab initio mundi. He represents the authentic India.
Some say that the Orient is always corrected for not being in
the European or American space and that it has a triple force
which actions against the Orient, against Orientalism and
against the Occidental consumer of Orientalism. (Iliescu)
The true quest for Aadam Aziz comes when he is
supposed to cure an ill girl. India proves again not to be a
conventional country. The HEIDELBERG bag is the root of all
evil in Tai’s opinion. It means suffering and lack of feelings:
“To the ferryman, the bag represents Abroad; it is the alien
thing, the invader, progress”. This simple bag is the seed of
distrust between the ferryman and Dr. Aziz. The doctor
cannot pass over the allowance of the local doctor, he knows
he is an intruder. Tai, not being initiated, thinks that the
stethoscope in the “bag made of dead pigs” is used instead
of smelling. This is the way simple people fabricate the way
an unknown thing works. The status of this Indian born
German doctor seems equal to a servant as he is almost
criticized by the woman servant. When the final moment
arrives Dr. Aziz is stupefied by the strange situation. This is
the point when Orient stops being regressive: the doctor is
called to examine the patient using the western knowledge
but the patient is seen after rules of the eastern society.
I watched a TV broadcast on TVRCultural on
st
the 21 of January 2010 having Salman Rushdie as guest.
Speaking about his latest book, “The Enchantress of
Florence”, Rushdie says that the world would have been
much improved had a union between Queen Elizabeth 1st

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and Akhbar the Great existed. He also mentioned the fact
that “you become a meaningless person” by being in a place
where you are unknown. But Aziz was known to his German
friends and yet they did not try to understand he world he
came from. In this way Aziz had to live two lives, to be the
one who understands both culture and his quest is to
conciliate them.
It might be that the European eyes gaze at India
through a perforated sheet because the old values do not
unveil so easily in front of the ones who are not conaisseurs.
This instinct of preservation is a warning to the fact that an
ancestral tradition cannot be observed too close and all of a
sudden as not to cause a disdain to its most guarded values.
But this incapacity to reveal the beauty of the Indian nation
represented in the text by a woman builds a void between
East and West. To heal the flaws of a nation one needs to
get to know it better but healing should not mean erasing
good things and planting bad ones.

Bibliography:

Iliescu, Radu. “Orientul inventat de occidentali” Review of

Orientalism by Edward W. Said (1978). 25 February 2009.
Online. <http://www.bookblog.ro/stiinte-umaniste-
religie/radu-iliescu/orientalism/>
[22 Jan. 2010]

Said, Edward. Orientalism. Preface, p. xxii. Bookrags Staff.

"Orientalism: Quotes". 2005. Thomson Gale. 22 Jan 2010.
<http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-
orientalism/quotes.html>.

I also used the course as a support of my analysis.