Midnight's children

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fictional autobiography of a child born at the moment India became independent in 1947.

And as the child grows up, he feels that the ups and downs of his own life mirror the fortunes of the country. Quite a long time ago I read a novel, A bend in the Ganges, set in the time of India's independence, and from that I knew it was beset by violence. That novel, like this one, followed the history of a family, and how the family was affected by the historical events. But Midnight's Children is no straightforward historical novel. It is surreal. Or perhaps paranormal. Or perhaps magic realism. It aims to show not the mere historical events, but the spiritual significance of them.

And so the children who were born at or immediately after midnight on 15 August 1947 are able to communicate with each other telepathically, and have abilities that science fiction writers of the 1950s used to indicate conventionally with the abbreviation PSI.

It is quite a dense and complex book, and I thought that, like some long and complex Russian novels, it needed a list of Dramatis Personae that one could refer to. There are so many characters that when one finds a reference to something that happened to one of them 150 pages earlier, one needs to reread the earlier incident to remember what happened and who was involved. But that means it is not the kind of book to read once and throw away. There ware things that will become clearer on a second or third, or even a seventh or eighth reading.

But now I have to take it back to the library. A few years ago I tried to read The Satanic Verses by the same author, and couldn't finish it. I found it too boring and confusing. If iot was satire, it was satirising things beyond my experience, which I couldn't connect to. But Midnight's Children reminded me of a song from 50 years ago:

Yesterday's dream didn't quite come true
We fought for our freedom and what did it do?
Now no one can see where they stand. 

And fifty years ago, when we sang that song, freedom was still tomorrow's dream, but I knew, back then, that when it came and faded into the past as yesterday's dream, we would know that it didn't quite come true. 

Twenty-five years ago I visited Kenya, which had been independent for just over 30 years, as India was at the end of Salman Rushdie's book. Several Kenyans asked me about South Africa, which had then enjoyed about a year of its brand-new democracy, which we had been all excited about, but the Kenyans showed no interest in that. Their questions showed that what interested them most about South Africa was the Mandela divorce, and who would get the money. They could not conceive of a politician who was not in it purely for the money. And 25 years later we have reached the same point in South Africa. And Salman Rushdie shows the spiritual reality of that, as it played out in India.

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Untouchables - Dalits and Hindutva - Synchroblog

Over the last few years I have edited a number of abstracts of articles in missiological journals and a surprisingly high proportion of them deal with Dalits and Hindutva.

Consider the following extracts from a missiological article "Post Modern Challenges to Christian Mission in India" by V. Devasahayam (Bishop in Madras, CSI)

Though there has been a variety of approaches among missionaries, this wholly negative picturisation of mission history is neither factual or true to the experience of people in India, particularly the oppressed. JW Pickett says that Christianity has contributed to the economic development of converts, through education, health services, housing, personality reconstruction, reduction of wasteful expenditure etc. Missionaries protected the untouchable converts from violence and harassment, pleaded with government for their rights and represented them in public forums and courts. Their efforts to draw public attention the untouchables question stimulated Indian efforts on their behalf. “The fear of the Christian missionary is the beginning of social wisdom in India” remarked K. Natarajan

Mrs. Mohini Das attests to this fact:

“Stop for a moment and see what is happening. In both mission schools and government schools and hospitals the daughters of so called ‘Depressed classes’ now Christians, are teaching and tending the children of ‘Brahmins’. Untouchables? What has happened? They are untouchables no longer, for Jesus has touched them”.

To say that, however, affirms only the positive side, but there was a negative side as well, because a bit further on in the same article the author writes:

The caste Christians have not recognised Christian Dalits as equals and Dalits’ claim to equality is resented. Syrian Christians protested when all students were seated together in the CMS Teacher Training Institute in 1905. They complained to the Bishop: “We shall be glad to be informed why you have made this innovation in the seating arrangements without paying due attention to our feelings and opinions”. Fortunately the petition was dismissed both on theological ground and on the principle of equality. When Dalits demanded admission in school for their children, it was resisted by caste people including caste Christians. A prominent journalist wrote: To admit together the caste that had been cultivating intelligence for generations and those castes who had been cultivating land tannamount to tying a horse and a buffalo to plough under the same yoke. There are stories of caste Christians jumping out of the church through the windows when some Dalits were taken into the church for baptism. Christian Dalits are discriminated against by caste Christians both in the religious and secular spheres.

I have quoted just one article but one can read much the same in many articles in many different journals. One can summarise it by saying that Christian mission helped to improve the social position of the Dalits in India, but that many caste Christians were scandalised by this. And in recent years there has been growing resistance among Brahmins, leading to a growth in Hindutva -- Hindu nationalism.

Again, in the same article the author describes Hindutva without "Hindu tolerance": From the time of Gandhi, Hinduism was known for its tolerance of other religions, but that time is rapidly passing, and Hindutva seems to be gearing up for the Clash of Civilizations.

The controversial supreme court Judgement on Dec.11, 1995 has given Hindutva a legal approval: “ordinarily, Hindutva is understood as a way of life or a state of mind, and it is not to be equated with or understood as, religious Hindu fundamentalism”. The Hindu nationalist parties fought the elections in the name of Hindutva with the legal sanction for the first time. The architect of Hindutva ideology Savarkar’s said, “the crying need of our times is not men of letters but soldiers. …. you should abandon your pens in favour of guns.” The major items of Hidutva agenda are the consolidation of the Hindu community, the defence of its religion, the Hinduisation of politics, the militarisation of Hindudom, the establishment of Hindu rashtra and the reconversion of former Hindus.

Read the full article here:

For other synchrbogs on the theme of "untouchables", see:

• Mike Bursell muses about Untouchables
• David Fisher on Touching the Pharisees - My
  Untouchable People Group
• Michael Bennet writes Nothing more than the crust life
• Jeremiah at Models of
  church leadership and decision-making as they apply to outreach
• John Smulo talks about Christian Untouchables
• Sally Coleman shares on The untouchables
• Sam Norton talks about Untouchables
• Sonja Andrews visits the subject here
• Fernando A. Gros speaks up on Untouchability And Glocalisation
• Phil Wyman throws out the Loose Lips - A "SinkroBlog"
• Josh Rivera does his stuff with the Untouchables