Assignment - 12

Language and Hybridity: The Politics of English in Salman Rushdie’s 'Midnight’s Children' 

Assignment Details:

Paper : 202: Indian English Literature – Post-Independence

Topic :  Language and Hybridity: The Politics of English in Salman Rushdie’s 'Midnight’s Children'

Submitted to - Smt. S.B.Gardi Department of English M.K.B.U.

Date of Submission: 07/11/2025

Personal Information:

Name: Khushi Raviya

Batch: M.A. Sem - 3 (2024-2026)

Enrollment Number: 5108240029

Roll No: 10

Table of contents

• Assignment Details 

• Personal Information

• Abstract

• Key Words

• Introduction

• Language as Hybridity in Midnight’s Children

• The Politics of English: Appropriation and Subversion

• Hybrid Subjectivity and the Third Space

• Conclusion

• References

Abstract:

This essay explores how Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children negotiates the politics of English and the phenomenon of cultural hybridity in post-Independence India. It argues that the novel’s linguistic play its code-switching, neologisms, and strategic “chutnification” of English transforms the colonizer's language into a site of resistance and re-appropriation. Through this deliberate hybridity, the novel creates a “third space” where fixed notions of national identity, language, and cultural difference converge and are contested. The analysis reveals the underlying tension between global English and local voices, demonstrating how Rushdie uses language to articulate a postcolonial subjectivity that challenges the fractured legacy of colonialism itself.

Keywords:

Midnight’s Children · Salman Rushdie · Hybridity · Postcolonial English · Code-switching · Chutnification · Cultural Identity · Third Space.

Introduction:

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) opens with a moment of profound symbolic convergence: the protagonist Saleem Sinai is born at the exact instant of India’s independence on 15 August 1947. This synchronicity inextricably links individual destiny with national history, foreshadowing that the story of the new nation will be narrated in a hybrid language, through a hybrid identity. Historically, India’s independence from British rule inaugurated a complex era marked by both newfound freedom and the trauma of Partition, a ambitious nation-building project, and the complex layering of a colonial legacy over deep-rooted local cultures. English, once the unequivocal language of the colonizer, remained entrenched in administration and education; yet, in Rushdie's hands, it becomes a medium of subversion and transformative creation.

Within this context, the politics of English and the concept of cultural hybridity are central to the novel's project. Hybridity, as theorized by Homi K. Bhabha, designates an interstitial “third space” where colonial and native cultures intermingle, producing new, ambivalent forms of identity and meaning. In Midnight’s Children, this hybridity manifests most powerfully through language: the deliberate mixing of English with Indian idioms, puns, local dialects, and untranslated words, culminating in the coining of “chutnification” a term denoting the spicing up of English with distinctively Indian flavours. Through these strategies, Rushdie interrogates the standardized, “pure” English of the colonizer and forges a hybrid English that reflects the multifaceted reality of the postcolonial subject. This essay will examine how language in the novel becomes a site of hybridity and contestation; how the politics of English its appropriation and subversion reflects the formation of postcolonial identity; and how this linguistic fusion opens up a hybrid subjectivity that challenges fixed national identities.

1. Language as Hybridity in Midnight’s Children:

1.1 Code-Switching, Transliteration, and Neologism:

Rushdie consistently undermines the dominance of standard English by peppering his narrative with untranslated Hindi and Urdu words, colloquial Indian English, and inventive puns. This technique mirrors what Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin term the "polydialectical" strategy, where the postcolonial writer uses code-switching to assert cultural difference. For instance, Saleem casually uses words like "dhoban" (washerwoman), "lathi-charge" (a police baton charge), and "pushful" (a distinctly Indian-English adjective for someone overly assertive). This is not a failure to translate, but a deliberate political and aesthetic choice that forces the reader, regardless of origin, to engage with the text on its own linguistic terms, resisting the cultural hegemony of "pure" English.

1.2 The “Chutnification” of English:

Rushdie coins the term “chutnification” to describe the core process of his linguistic project. Just as chutney is made by preserving and spicing various fruits and vegetables, Rushdie’s English absorbs and adapts local cultural ingredients to create a new, uniquely postcolonial linguistic blend. Saleem explicitly states, “I am the chutney of history,” and his narrative method follows suit. The result is an English that is no longer purely colonial but has been irrevocably transformed by the colonized. This is not merely a stylistic flourish but a central site of resistance and identity formation, creating a language that is capable of containing the chaotic, pluralistic reality of India.

1.3 Oral Tradition and Hybrid Narration:

The novel’s form itself is a performance of hybridity. The narrator, Saleem, invokes the ancient Indian tradition of oral storytelling, complete with digressions, asides, and a direct audience in the character of Padma. Yet, the medium for this oral epic is English. He pleads with Padma, "Don't go!... Without you, I am alone, without my necessary ear," merging the colloquial intimacy of the Indian katha (story) session with the global language of the novel. This fusion of local narrative tradition with a global language creates a hybrid form that parallels the hybrid identity of the nation and its narrator.

2. The Politics of English: Appropriation and Subversion:

2.1 From Colonizer’s Tool to Postcolonial Voice:

English in India was historically the language of administration, elite schooling, and colonial control. In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie performs a decisive act of appropriation. The narrator seizes this language and wields it not for colonial ends, but to articulate the very Indian experiences and voices that were once marginalized by it. As Neil ten Kortenaar argues, "Rushdie uses English to write India into existence, to claim the language for his own purposes". Thus, English is subverted from within, becoming a tool for decolonizing the narrative of history itself.

2.2 Power, Memory, and the Collapse of Binaries:

Rushdie demonstrates that language is a vessel for power, memory, and history. By using English to narrate India's tumultuous history, Saleem collapses the rigid binary of colonizer/colonised. The novel asserts that English is not inherently colonial; it is capable of carrying the Indian story, but only when it is profoundly inflected by Indian difference. The language itself becomes a palimpsest, bearing the traces of both its colonial past and its postcolonial present, challenging any singular, authoritative narrative.

2.3 Nation, English, and Identity Formation:

The question of a national language was a site of intense contention in newly independent India. By choosing a hybridized English as his medium, Rushdie directly engages with this political complexity. The "midnight's children" a microcosm of India's diverse linguistic, cultural, and regional mix symbolize this pluralistic identity. Their shared, yet fractured, ability to communicate in a "mind-spoken" network mirrors the condition of a nation grappling with its own diverse voices. Their English is plural and hybrid, reflecting a nation perpetually in flux.

3. Hybrid Subjectivity and the Third Space:

3.1 Hybridity as an Identity Strategy:

Drawing on Bhabha’s concept, the novel’s characters consistently navigate mixed identities, inhabiting the "third space" between colonial past, indigenous present, and global future. Saleem himself is the ultimate product of this hyphenated belonging: biologically the son of a departing Englishman, raised by a Hindi-speaking Kashmiri family, and English-educated. He confesses, "I have been a swallower of lives," and his identity, like his body, is a fragile construct of disparate parts (Rushdie 4). He does not belong to one world but exists in the liminal space between them.

3.2 Language as an Identity Marker:

In the novel, hybrid subjectivity is intrinsically lodged in language. When characters speak and think in an English infused with Indian rhythms and idioms, they assert a composite, resistant identity. This "translingual" mode allows for both a resistance to standard English and an assertion of a new, self-defined identity. As argued in critical studies of postcolonial narratives, this linguistic hybridity "reshapes identity and sets up the aspects of resistance". Saleem’s voice is the primary evidence of this reshaping.

3.3 Cultural Syncretism and the National Narrative:

The novel weaves together myth, history, folklore, and political satire within an English narrative framework. This formal syncretism stands in for the hybrid nation itself. In this third space, the politics of English and cultural hybridity fully converge: the nation is narrated in an English that has been made Indian, and the postcolonial subject is English-speaking yet rooted in India's vast multiplicities. This challenges the very idea of a pure, unified national culture, proposing instead a identity based on creative fusion.

Conclusion:

In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie masterfully harnesses the politics of English through the creative power of cultural hybridity. The novel’s "chutnified" English playful, richly Indianised, and defiantly impure serves as the primary marker of a new postcolonial subjectivity and a vehicle for resisting monolithic narratives. By appropriating and radically redefining the colonizer's language, Rushdie dissolves entrenched colonial binaries and creates a vibrant "third space" where identity, language, and nation are continuously renegotiated. The implications for postcolonial literature are profound: the colonizer's tongue can indeed become the most powerful voice of the colonized; hybridity is not a deficit but a generative and potent force; and English, in its many global iterations, has become native to the postcolonial world. As India and other postcolonial nations continue to navigate complex linguistic landscapes, Midnight’s Children endures as a foundational text for understanding how language mediates, and ultimately liberates, culture, history, and power.

References:

- Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. “The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures.” 1992,https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273942653_The_Empire_Writes_Back_Theory_and_Practice_in_Post-Colonial_Literatures. Accessed 21 October 2025.

- Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

- Bounse, Sarah Habib. “Hybridity and Postcoloniality: Formal, Social, and Historical Innovations in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.” 20 April 2009, https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=2254&context=utk_chanhonoproj. Accessed 21 October 2025.

- D’Cruze Mira. “Reconstructing Postcolonial Identity: A Comparative Analysis of Cultural Hybridity in Salman Rushdie’s Novels with a Focus on the South Asian Context.” vol. 2, 2023, https://www.pioneerpublisher.com/jrssh/article/view/611. Accessed 21 October 2025.

- Khan Abbas. “Investigating Identity, Hybridity, And Resistance: A Critical Study Of Postcolonial Narratives.” vol. 21, 2024, https://migrationletters.com/index.php/ml/article/view/11036. Accessed 21 October 2025.

- Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. Jonathan Cape, 1981.

- Shankar, S. “Midnight’s Orphans, or a Postcolonialism Worth Its Name.” Cultural Critique, no. 56, 2004, pp. 64–95. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354717. Accessed 21 Oct. 2025.

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