“To understand one life you must swallow the world” – Explore Saleem's presentation as an allegory of India in 'Midnight's Children'. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The peculiarity of the title "Midnight's Children" makes it immediately clear that this novel is out of the ordinary. Perhaps its most remarkable aspect is Saleem's character's allegory of a single human being for the fall of postcolonial India. Yet Rushdie doesn't make it that simple; combined with Saleem's allegorical nature are autobiographical and fantastical aspects. And our narrator's distinctive spirit and morals give him an identity, probably too narrow to conceivably represent an entire country, one that is a conglomerate of people, politics, geography, religions, languages, and cultures. At the same time, obvious aspects such as the fact that Saleem shared his birth with that of the independent Indian state, and ultimately its collapse, mirror that of his homeland. Such associations are superficial, however, for it is the depth and style of Rushdie's narrative that truly creates the parallel between Saleem Sinai and postcolonial India. But in terms of the reader's understanding of Saleem's life and therefore his world, a solipsistic critic would claim that it is not possible to prove that a life exists, let alone understand it, certainly not within the parameters of a novel and therefore one cannot swallow the world. this is precisely what needs to be explored. Despite Saleem's clear intent to reflect events in India, some factors perhaps make it impossible to fully understand both the person and the country. There is the unreliability of Saleem's narrative, in which he draws attention to his flaws by calling himself "an incompetent puppeteer", and to his memory which "selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies... creates its own reality". In the essay "Is Nothing Sacred?" Rushdie says: “The inner space of the imagination is a theater that can never be closed.” On the one hand this serves as an epistemological idea that the reader can neither know nor understand the truth of contemporary India, underscoring Saleem's omniscience as a narrator. On a completely different level it shows that history is constructed, invented, just like a person invented by circumstances, or a character in a novel. This tells us that perhaps there is more to India that we have been taught, that the facts have been overwhelmed by lies, by propaganda, by agendas. In fact the moment of independence, a historical fact, is called "mass fantasy", a "collective fiction" and coincides with the birth of the midnight children who possess magical powers, a juxtaposition of the true with the false, the imagination and reality. Rushdie's narrative mode seeks to convey a coexistence of fantasy and reality. Parvati, who made Saleem invisible in order to return to Bombay, in love with him, but having endured the impossibility of consummation because her husband "has superimposed on her features the horribly eroded physiognomy of Jamila Singer", endures a painful ordeal: "La la Parvati-the-witch's cervix, despite contractions as painful as mule kicks, refused to dilate. Her role in the novel is magical, yet her ordeal coincides temporally with the period between Mrs. Gandhi's guilty verdict and the subsequent seizure of emergency powers. Likewise, the magical power of Shiva's knees to “grasp and choke” has such significance, as the return of this violent figure in thenarration takes place on a date similar to that of the first nuclear explosion in India. Of course there are other examples of overlap between fiction and reality, but in these Rusdhie shows how strange and unstable the political reality of the time was. It may also be an ironic suggestion, although the novel was written for a Western audience, its magical realism, along with the confusion of Saleem's memory, has an alienating effect, perhaps Rusdhie implies that the Western reader is distant and ignorant of the Saleem's past. India, unable to empathize with the problems of the victims of the former colonial but rather feel a sense of shame. .This sense of strangeness and instability of the politics and problems of the time is associated with Saleem. It seems that he is unable to live a personal and independent life, but only a life occupied by the problems of the country and of other people, possibly representative of them. His birth being simultaneous with that of the "new India", Mr. Nehru wrote him a letter saying, "It will in a certain sense be the mirror of ours." His fall is simultaneous with that of India, highlighted by his awareness of his bad memory and, above all, by the use of triple stopping points “…” and a complex and baffling syntax, “I don't want to tell it! – But I swore to tell everything. – No, I give up, no, surely some things are better left alone…? – Does not wash; what cannot be cured must be endured!” This pattern of cracks and splits in Saleem's language and psyche increases, creating incoherence, symbolic of the "collapse" of Saleem and therefore India itself. This is significant because it once again shows Saleem's lack of individuality, the way he is “handcuffed to history” – the macroscale of history is constantly referred to the microscale of the individual. Ultimately, it is a statement that it is not only possible, but perhaps necessary to observe a particular life in order to try to understand the whole world. Despite his existence as an allegorical instrument and his lack of individuality, Saleem has his own personality and is clearly human. His creativity manifests itself in his language, which ranges from the colloquial slang of "goonda", "Sahib", "nakkoo", to eloquent and poetic descriptions such as "incomprehensibly labyrinthine saltwater canals overhung by cathedral-arching masts". There are sentences that are pages long, passages full of compound words. Its impressionability and cultural diversity are illustrated in the neologisms “twoness”, “overtowered”, “Godknowswhats”. And his childish humor is on display, with his account of Zafar's enuresis: "I woke up in the small hours in a big rancid pool of warm liquid and started screaming blue murder", and his love of "Snakes and Ladders,” symbolizing his rather brazen fascination with sex. In creating this image of Saleem, Rushdie used a myriad of techniques and styles, such as magical realism, western, Bollywood, and modernism. It is as if the old literary techniques are not enough to describe the newly independent India with its new diversity. It is appropriate that a postcolonial novel in English seeks to create a distinctively Indian voice and that in its own character, and that of Saleem, shows the plurality of voices that make up the country. Indeed, the idea of ​​plurality is one of the most important features of the novel. The concept that a single person can symbolize a multitudinous, diverse country encapsulates the tension between the one and the many, so relevant to the multilingual, interfaith cultural hybrid that was India. “Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that has happened before me, of everything I have been seen to do, of everything that has been done to me.” This.