Crack is ...

(well, you know.)

The second book on our course reading list is Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, winner of the Booker of Bookers, voted the best book to win the Booker, the British Pulitzer, in 25 years. Rushdie is perhaps best known for the scandal over Satanic Verses, which got him a fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini. After the fatwa was lifted, Rushdie went on to produce more novels (not as interesting, in my opinion), including one either inspired by or the inspiration behind a U2 song, and he served for a few years as the director of the PEN center in New York. He is also married to one of the most vapid cooking show hosts ever, Padma Lakshmi, whom you might know as the mealy-mouthed, tarty host of Top Chef.

Midnight’s Children, like most of the books I teach, is one of my favorite books. It is narrated from the perspective of Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight on the same day India declared its independence from Britain on August 15, 1947. This coincidence endows him with magical, telepathic powers to communicate with the other “midnight’s children.” As he explains, “thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.” Saleem’s propitious birth is but one instance of his family’s intimate connection with world events. In fact, this connection goes far beyond mere correlation; the deeply personal generates the historical. His grandmother’s fury at her daughter’s unconsummated marriage explodes on the same day that the atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, for example. Through this narrative conceit (conceit both as metaphor and as monomania), Rushdie weaves a remarkable tale that combines historical commentary with fantastic events.

Part and parcel of the novel is the historical mistake. Apparently, upon the novel’s publication, Rushdie received many letters regarding the factual inaccuracies in the novel, including his getting the year of Gandhi’s assassination wrong. In “Errata,” Rushdie remarks that the narrator does indeed comment on his own fallibility and his capacity for error. The errors are there in a deliberate attempt to undercut the narrator’s authority, but they also reflect the way that ordinary people experience historical events, in a personal and sometimes subjective way. For example, I could not give you offhand the exact month and day that the (first) Persian Gulf war began, and it would take a little number-crunching in my head to figure out the exact year. 1991? However, I do remember that my friends and I protested the war, while the water polo team hung up a huge sign over the school swimming pool with a slogan that went something like, “USA: Love it or Leave It.”

One interesting thing I noticed as I prepped for class, however, is that Rushdie did change at least one detail in 2006 edition of the book, which originally appeared in 1980. The scene is the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre. In the 1910s, Gandhi’s nationalism movement was gaining steam. The British passed the Rowlatt Acts in 1919 in an attempt to curtail Indian rights. Among the many protests was one at Jallianwalla Bagh, a kind of field area in Amritsar, a town located in the Punjab region in northern India. On April 13, Indians gathered for a peaceful protest at Jallianwalla Bagh. General Dyer surrounded the Indians with a “native” regiment, a regiment in the British army composed of Indian soldiers, many of whom were Sikhs. He ordered them to fire indiscriminately on the crowd; about 500 were killed, a thousand wounded. The massacre sparked an international outcry and Dyer’s actions were condemned by Parliament.

Here is how Rushdie originally described Dyer’s entrance: “Aziz [Saleem’s grandfather] penetrates the heart of the crowd, as Brigadier R. E. Dyer arrives at the entrance to the alleyway, followed by fifty white troops.”

As I mentioned above, the troops were actually Indians. In the 2006 edition, Rushdie “corrects” his error: “Aziz penetrates the heart of the crowd, as Brigadier R. E. Dyer arrives at the entrance to the alleyway, followed by fifty crack troops” (my italics).

The revision of course does away with the whole racial angle played up by identifying the troops as “white.” Instead, they are now “crack” troops, that is, elite or expert troops. But I placed quotes around “corrects” because the change is not so much a correction as a modification. The “crack” actually points to the crack in the narrative, the original error or mistake. It is a crack that breaks up the unity of the book, because there are now two novels called Midnight’s Children.

This point is not far-fetched. For one, it is obvious to anyone who reads the book or reads the 2006 preface, where Rushdie shares a couple of slogans from his advertising days in the 1970s, that the writing is very punny, pun-soaked and pun-drunk. The novel (in either incarnation) invites the reader to join in the play.

For another, cracking up is a major theme in the novel. This is no Bildungsroman but an Unbildungsroman (not sure if I’ve got German right here), the story of a narrator’s breaking apart in a very literal way: “I am literally disintegrating…I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious dust.” The narrator’s body is disintegrating, cracks are opening up all over his skin, but he is also literally disintegrating, disintegrating into the many millions of letters that make up the novel’s prose. A decomposition in composition, if you will.

The disintegration of the narrator’s body, the unravelling of his life, is also an allegory for the historical trauma of Indian independence, which cannot be thought apart from Partition, the division of the sub-continent into India and Pakistan (which was later further broken up into present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh). Muslim and Hindu nationalist movements were uneasy allies at best during the years leading up to Partition. In a concession to the Muslim minority (then almost a 1/3 of the population, Hindus were almost 2/3, and Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and others made up the parts of the population not covered by “almost”), the British agreed to the partition of the subcontinent. Chaos ensued, as Muslims and Hindus, especially in the northern border areas, tried to escape both Muslim and Hindu violence. A million people died during these years, and of course, animosity between India and Pakistan continues to the present day over nuclear arms and territorial disputes in Kashmir.

The “crack” in the passage I cited above, then, is a critique of these splintering, exclusivist, divisive nationalisms. That is, Rushdie criticizes the desire for a myth of national origin, whether it be Muslim nostalgia for the Mughal empire or the assertion of Hindu as the one syncretic faith of India. Just as there is no one Midnight’s Children, there is no one Indian national identity. Nations are heterogenous and fuzzy things, and their histories testify to a process of “blurring and mixing,” as one historian puts it, of errancy and deviation. It is impossible to do justice to Rushdie’s vision here, but let me just say that the novel is a remarkable attempt, an epic attempt, to embrace the experiences of all of the heterogenous groups that make up the South Asian subcontinent.

Cracking up, then, into millions of letters. Cracking up, in the sense of losing one’s mind, but also cracking up, in the sense of uncontrollable laughter (this is a very funny book). I hope you enjoy the book as much as I do.