Postcolonial body in Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

The rich content of Salman Rushdie's works has been examined and criticized by many theorists. Salman Rushdie is strikingly reflected his cultural hybridity in his works as he is an Indian-born British writer. Therefore, it is possible to find traces of both Indian and British culture in the contents and forms of his works. The depictions and characters in his works, and his unique style constitute the prominent examples of postcolonial fiction. While many of the elements in his works are worthy to be analyzed and criticized from different perspectives, one of them is the fact that the European or non-white characters he creates in his works have a certain deformation in their bodies and that they become the 'other' due to the effect of this. In this study, the relationship between postcolonial criticism, body and culture will be discussed and Rushdie's Midnight's Children will be examined in terms of postcolonial criticism and cultural studies. Midnight's Children and other novels will be analyzed in terms of textual relations between these novels, and body metaphors will be compared. The role of the deformed body in the process of othering will be emphasized and the effects of this are tried to reveal in terms of the body and cultural representation. From this point of view, the aim of this study is to examine why these deformations cause such a deficiency in non-white or non-European characters. The importance of this study is to indicate that people, who is regarded as the 'other' in the eyes of the white man, have unconditionally accepted this situation instead of getting rid of this and become more 'other' due to the deformations of their bodies.