Al Midnight’s Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity Patrick Colm Hogan M. Keith Booker has recently drawn attention to a common ten- dency in the interpretive criticism of Salman Rushdie, and indeed of much postcolonization literature: the tendency to assume that any devi- ation from “linear” narrative is disruptive of colonialist hegemony, Booker rightly points out that this assumption lumps Marxist anticolonial histo- ries into the same category as imperial propaganda (“Midnight's Children”. He might have added that it lumps anticolonial postmodern narratives together with any incoherent, rambling, paranoiac, racist history. The problems don’t stop there. Humanists write as if the difference between “linear” and “nonlinear” narrative is straightforward. But in fact it is hardly clear what constitutes a linear narrative. Sometimes a “linear” narrative is one in which there is any sort of causal explanation. But by this criterion, all narratives are linear. You just can’t have a narrative with- out causal explanation. Sometimes “linear” narratives are ones in which everything is given a causal explanation, while “nonlinear” narratives have gaps, occurrences that are not explained. This is a reasonable definition. But it reverses the preceding problem, for by this criterion there are no linear narratives. No story explains everything. There are only degrees of explanatory completeness. Moreover, this definition makes standard political claims about narrative self-evidently implausible. How could it be the case that a story with more unexplained variables—events, situa- tions, actions of characters that are not accounted for but occur as if at random—how could it be that such a story is politically empowering simply by explaining less? This would seem to entail the bizarre idea ‘Tiventieth-Century Literature 47.4. Winter 2001 510.Midnight's Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity that one is best able to change a political or economic system when one understands nothing at all about it. Finally, this assumption participates in the absurd rhetorical inflation that has affected humanistic writing in recent years. It seems that we are no longer satisfied with saying that a novel criticizes or analyzes colo- nialism. Rather, we must say that it “disrupts” the economy of colonial- ism, or “undermines” hegemony, or “empowers” colonized peoples. In other words, we cannot simply describe the political implications or pur- poses of a particular literary work. Rather, we must posit an effect—and, indeed, an effect that is vast, revolutionary, transformative, as if the very fact of a story's publication was socially equivalent to a decade of sys- tematic land reform or the establishment of an independent government. I should say at the outset that I have nothing against nonpolitical interpretations of literary works. Human life is vast, multiple, irreducible. Literature is not confined to one part of it. Thus all sorts of analysis, dis cussion, appreciation, and critique have a place in literary study and in what the Greeks called eudaimonia, human flourishing. But the prob- lem with claims of the sort isolated and criticized by Booker is that they pretend to be political while in fact they occlude many real economic, cultural, governmental, historical, and more generally human issues that are or should be central to political discussion. In short, they usurp the place of politics. Booker suggests that this tendency may be particularly unfortunate in Rushdie’s case, for the politics concealed in Rushdie are, effectively, a Cold War politics of anticommunism. It seems to me that Booker somewhat overstates his case. Yes, the communists are treated parodically in Midnight's Children—but so is ev- eryone else. Yes, Rushdie is critical of the communist movement—but he also shows considerable sympathy for some aspects of the movement and some of its representatives. Yes, the communists are presented as ma- gicians and illusionists, but they are also “people whose hold on reality was absolute” (476). Yes, Saleem tells us that Picture Singh, the commu- nist leader, was antidemocratic, but Saleem also tells us, “I can say, with utter certainty, that Picture Singh was the greatest man I ever met” (474). Still, even if his claims are somewhat overstated, Booker is right that, in the end, Rushdie does appear to repudiate communism as a real option for India, a genuine possibility for fulfilling the hopes and dreams repre- sented by the 1,001 children of midnight. Does this mean, then, that Rushdie offers no option for the futurePatrick Colm Hogan of India—or only some sort of mild-mannered liberal humanism that would sweep class stratification under the rug (like the history of the Hummingbird, hero of noncommunalist Muslims, or his assistant Nadir Khan, later Qasim the Red)? There is certainly an element of this in Rushdie’s writings. However, I do not believe that this is all there is to Rushdie’s politics. Nor do I believe that his dissociation from commu- nism is all there is to his treatment of class. In some ways, the problem here is one of the conceptual grid through which we come to analyze Rushdie’s work—and this has ramifications that reach well beyond an understanding of Midnight's Children. If we view Rushdie’s politics through a schema of liberal democracy and com- munism, it is clear that Rushdie’s leanings are toward liberal democracy. Suppose we expand the problematic to include democracy, party rule (or other forms of oligarchy), socialism, and capitalism. Here matters be- come less clear. Rushdie clearly favors democracy over oligarchy—but what exactly are his views on the economic system? This lack of clarity may indicate a political problem with Rushdie’s work. But it also sug- gests that perhaps we are asking the wrong sorts of questions about the novel, Perhaps its politics operates most importantly along another axis. It is clear that at least one major concern in Midnight's Children is a particular imagination of Indian nationhood. Specifically, Rushdie has an obvious concern with the way in which the unifying imagination of the modern nation addresses issues of diversity—political, ethnic, reli- gious, or whatever. In Midnight’s Children there are two primary alterna- tives for this imagination. In the first, the oneness of nationhood is authoritarian—centralized, homogenous, dominated by a single individ- ual, a single party, a single ethnicity. This vision of the nation seeks to eliminate or control diversity and is, in consequence, continually plagued by dissent. It is continually embattled, for it is endlessly challenged by rival authorities, centers, homogeneities. For example, the Hindu nation is disrupted by Muslim and Sikh; the strong central government is un- dermined by separatism. The alternative to this authoritarian imagina~ tion is pluralistic imagination, a view of nationhood not as a place where individual and group diversity are subjugated to absolutism but where national unity provides instead a common ground for multiple forms of democratic participation. Allegorically, these two imaginations are per- sonified in Rushdie’s novel as the two primary “children of midnight,” the two primary ways of thinking and acting that are born simultaneously 512‘Midnight's Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity with the new nation: Shiva, whose mighty knees bring all opponents to kneel, and Saleem, whose capacious, telepathic mind allows a place for all the hopes and dreams of the new India, all its classes and persuasions, all its talents and ideas and histories, jostling and disagreeing like so many parliamentary representatives. In part, this instances Rushdie’s liberal humanism. However, it also raises a set of political issues surrounding identity—what it is, how it operates, what its implications are for social and political life. Indeed, the political center of Rushdie’s novel is, I believe, the imagination and en- actment of different identities, even different types of identity. And this point supersedes or perhaps subsumes issues of democracy or dictator- ship, capitalism or communism. One might criticize the politics of the novel, certainly. But it is important first to understand them on their own terms. To clarify and develop this point, | shall consider the beginning of the novel—the widely ignored Kashmir chapters—where Rushdie es- tablishes the political alternatives and structures that he will be examin- ing in the rest of the novel. Specifically, Rushdie does not begin his allegory with the birth of India, the birth of Shiva and Saleem. Nor does he begin with the independence movement. As Juraga notes, there is an “almost complete lack of coverage of the Gandhi-led Nationalist move- ment” (180). (In fact, Gandhi is far more ofa presence in the novel than is commonly recognized. We shall return to this point later.) Nor does he begin in, say, Bengal, where political and literary responses to Euro- pean modernity, including ideas of modern nationhood, developed with such intensity and consequence. Rushdie gives us only five years of the pre-independence struggle in India, barely covering the gestation peri- od of the new nation. Thus the continuous narrative of Midnight's Chil- dren begins in 1942. But that is not where the novel begins. Rather, it begins a quarter of a century earlier, in Kashmir. Why does Rushdie be- gin the novel with this prologue, only to leap over 23 years of important history thereafter? Of course, everyone recognizes that Kashmir is a cru- cial point of conflict between India and Pakistan, and readers familiar with Rushdie’ family background note his own ancestral ties to the Valley. However, the significance of the opening episode is much deeper—in what it suggests for the novel as a whole, in what it suggests about Kashmir itself, and in what it suggests about the broader politics of identity. 513History, myth, metaphor, and nothingness Before going on to examine these suggestions, however, we need to set out a few general characteristics of the novel. First, as is well known, Rushdie’s novel is a national allegory. To establish and develop that alle- gory, Rushdie combines several techniques. Four recur prominently. A thorough analysis of this allegory will, then, typically involve four com- ponents parallel to these four techniques. The first component of analysis is inference to literalized idioms bear- ing on events or persons (in the latter case, personification). This is a standard technique in allegory, evident in authors from Spenser to Wal- cott. Obvious cases in Rushdie would include the “birth of the nation,” the idea that a nation has “many parents,” and that the “heritage” of In- dia is Muslim and Hindu and Christian (thus Saleem’s Muslim, Hindu, and Christian parents). Many national allegories are confined largely to techniques of this sort. These allegories are rather broad and, so to speak, conceptual, treating, for example, general alternatives for the future of the nation—such as socialism versus capitalism or tradition versus mo- dernity. Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World is a case in point. The novel does treat specific historical incidents (such as the 1907 Hin- du/Muslim riot) in the literal plot. But the allegory itself is primarily a matter of opposing Nikhil’s anticommunalism and nonviolence to San- dip’s militancy and Hindu chauvinism—two alternative choices facing the nation (in the person of Bimala). Rushdie’ allegory, however, is not confined to this technique, for it is historically specific. Thus the second component in any analysis of Rushdie’s allegory is the isolation of relevant historical details. Though it may seem that this has been widely recognized, in fact most criticism of the novel barely touches on its often highly precise historical particu- larity (a particularity that is clear in the treatment of Kashmir). The rela~ tive lack of attention to historical detail is in part the result of a strange critical commonplace about the novel—that it undermines traditional notions of historical truth through its self-conscious use of errors. Har- rison, for example, disparages anyone who would “painstakingly argue for a consistently analogical allegory” in the novel, for Rushdie is “disre- spectfully deconstructive” (53). Reder asserts still more baldly that “Rush- die believes ... history is the same as ‘fiction’” (239). It is worth addressing this issue briefly before continuing. Consider 514Midnight's Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity the date of Gandhi’s assassination, cited by Harrison as an instance of deconstruction in the novel. Saleem informs the reader that “Re-read- ing my work, I have discovered an error in chronology. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date” (198). This is often seen as a sort of postmodern disruption or dismissal of his torical truth. But this seems to be a highly implausible interpretation. First of all, by telling us that he got the date “wrong,” made an “error,” Saleem at least appears to be telling us that there is a correct date, thus a historical fact. It seems a simple matter of logic. I cannot simultaneously claim that there is no fact about x and that I was mistaken about x. If there is no fact, then I can’t be mistaken. Far from undermining histori- cal truth, Saleem’s assertion seems to affirm it. Cundy adopts the more moderate interpretation that, for Rushdie, the historical fact “does not matter” (33). What really matters is the common belief about history, what people imagine to have happened. Certainly common belief is im- portant. But Rushdie most often indicates the importance of belief in relation to historical facts and the way those facts have been distorted to- ward (usually rather objectionable) political ends. For instance, this is one point of Rushdie’s insistence that nonseparatist Muslim politics were (al- legorically) killed by the Muslim League, then “swept . .. under the car- pet” (50), which is to say, deleted from history by those who wish to present the Muslim League as the only legitimate representative of Mus- lims and by those who wish to characterize all Muslims as separatist. In cases such as this, the importance of the common belief is stressed pre- cisely by stressing the importance of the facts. In other words, common belief is characterized and criticized as part of a dominant and distortive ideology. The point recurs throughout the novel—as when, in Pakistan, one of the most stifling aspects of life is the pervasive untruth, promi- nently including the “Divérce between news and reality” (399). But this still does not explain Rushdie’s purpose in “getting the date wrong” when recording Gandhi’s assassination. Rushdie has not includ- ed this error simply to affirm the possibility of truth while noting the fallibility of written histories—for, after all, histories don’t get the date wrong (why would they2). Rather, Rushdie wishes to express an atti- tude toward history. Indeed, he has literalized an idiom in doing this. As Saleem explains, “in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time” (198). The point should be clear. In Rushdie’s view, Gandhi should not have died when he did. He should have lived, shaping the nation’s 515Patrick Colm Hogan future. This idea, partially recognized by Goonetilleke (24), is also sug- gested by Aadam’s reaction when Amina hears that Gandhi’s assassin was Hindu and exclaims “Thank God. . . . [t's not a Muslim name!” Aadam’s stern response is, “This Godse is nothing to be grateful for!” (169). This brings us to the third technique of Rushdie’s allegory, the con- trasting of facts with aspirations, ideals, even simple alternatives. As Jean- Paul Sartre famously argued, things, matter, and space—what he calls the “in-itself”—are just what they are. They do not lack; they are always a fullness. Persons, in contrast, are the “for-itself” and as such have a rela~ tion to their own being and to that of the world. For us, then, the world of life, experience, and action is not occupied only with what is; it is pervaded by what is not. Being, for us, is always given form and point and force by nothingness. A room is filled not only by the people who are there, but by the absence of those we wish were there. History is the same, Each moment of history ousts infinite possibilities, as Stephen Ded- alus has it (Joyce 21). Any human relation to history, thus any concern about history, any valuing of its study, is a relation guided not only by what history is, but by what it is not. Indeed, in some ways the primary historical focus of Midnight’ Children is not on what did happen in the past, but on what did not happen. The very title tells us this. For the children of midnight are 1001 imaginative possibilities that are gradually impossibilized in the actual history of independent India. At any junc- ture in Rushdie’s allegory, then, it is crucial to find out not only what historical particulars did occur and are encoded in the events and per- sons of the novel, but equally what events did not occur, what particular possibilities were cut short, what nothingness enveloped the thin stra- tum of the real. Faced with inexorable fact, the continual stifling of possibility, we often respond by telling ourselves stories that manifest and systematize our sense of loss in the past while regenerating hope for the fature. The most important stories of this sort are shared by large communities, most often through religion. One way we reconcile ourselves to nothingness is through myth—myths of origin that explain our condition in a way that contingent matters of history cannot; eschatological myths that al- low us to imagine that whatever has been lost can, finally, be restored. ‘We imagine both historical reality and historical nothingness by way of myth. We see Providence at work in some social windfall, the hand of God in a disaster; one leader appears to us as Rama, another seems to 516‘Midnight’: Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity rely on the evil ploys of Ravana. Rushdie tacitly recognized the point. The fourth crucial technique of his allegory is the use of myth to orient events, to give resonance to images, places, persons. Practical identity against categorial identity: localism, nationalism, Gandhism But none of this takes us to Rushdie’s politics. Again, to understand his politics, we need to look at Midnight’: Children through a somewhat dif- ferent conceptual grid from the one that is commonly used. Specifically, the major opposition in Rushdie’s political thought is not that between socialism and capitalism or even that between democracy and oligarchy. Rather, it is the opposition between what I have called “practical identi- ty” and “categorial identity’—or, as I phrased it in an earlier work, “prac- tical identity” and “reflective identity” (for a further discussion of these concepts, see the first chapter and appendix of my Colonialism and the introduction to Empire). In all likelihood, Rushdie is not self-conscious- ly aware of this distinction. However, something along these lines im- plicitly structures his political thought in the novel. As we shall see, this is unsurprising in an Indian context, for a division of the same sort struc- tured whole areas of Gandhi’ politics as well. One’s categorial identity is, fundamentally, one’s self-concept. It is the hierarchized series of categories that one takes as definitive of one’s self. These categories include sex, ethnicity, race, religion, and many oth- ers—nationality and economic class among them. These categorizations are not, for the most part, the result of introspection. Rather, they derive primarily from explicit or implicit imputation. A child cannot look into a mirror or into his or her heart and discover that he or she is Indian or Pakistani, Hindu or Muslim. These are categories he or she learns from others, directly or indirectly. A whole series of things go along with categorial identity. First, the categories that define such identity serve to delimit in- and out-groups, in the technical, social psychological sense of these terms. A great deal of research shows that in-group/out-group divisions are deeply conse- quential for one’s attitude toward, evaluation of, and response to other people (see Duckitt 68-85 and citations). Even trivial group divisions— for example, a division based on a digit of one’s Social Security Num-Patrick Colm Hogan ber—lead people to evaluate members of their in-group more favorably, judge their work more highly, and treat them more generously than mem- bers of an out-group (Duckitt 68-69). Put differently, as soon as one accepts a categorization of oneself as Hindu rather than Muslim or as Catholic rather than Protestant, Irish rather than English, one will un- consciously begin to evaluate and respond to people differently, depending on which category defines them. A second important characteristic of categorial identity is that it is vacuous. As the social psychological research indicates, the robust moti- vational and other effects of categorial identity operate independently of any shared properties those categories might be seen as implying (see especially Duckitt 68-69 and 81). Categorial identification is, first and foremost, identification with a name—Hindu, say, or Muslim. It does not even necessarily entail a set of shared beliefs. It is an easy matter to find self-identified Hindus and self-identified Muslims (for example, mystics of both religions) who share more significant religious beliefs with one another than either shares with many (ritualistic or legalistic) members of “their own” religions. As Nandy et al. point out, “the Pranami sect in Gujarat .. . is in many ways closer to Islam than it is to many other sects within Hinduism” (51), while the reverse is true of “many Muslim com- munities in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Bengal” (52). Typically, the point does not affect categorial identification. A third significant characteristic is that categorial identity crosses geo- graphical regions and historical epochs. It reaches everyone who falls under the category, wherever and whenever that person might live or have lived. Benedict Anderson has argued influentially that the nation is an imagined community, In fact, the sort of national imagination dis- cussed by Anderson is simply a special case of the imagination required for any categorial identity. For categorial identities all define communi- ties, and they typically do so in ways that necessarily include people who do not and cannot enter into contact with one another. To categorize oneself as Indian involves an imagination of a community of Indians, but to imagine oneself as Muslim or Christian, male or female, white or black or Asian, does also. The last point becomes clearer when we contrast categorial identity with practical identity. Practical identity is the entire complex of habits, expectations, abilities, routines that integrate one’s daily activities with those of a community. One's practical identity encompasses everything 518Midnight's Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity from table manners and greeting customs to unreflective expectations of how others will act in any sort of communal recreation or labor. Unlike categorial identity, practical identity is not merely attributive. It is, rather, broadly experiential. Ie is also far from vacuous, for it is a set of concrete, active knowledges that enable our interactions with others, Finally, prac- tical identity is insistently local and proximate. It is a matter of being able to do things with people here and now. This is not to say that it necessarily contradicts global relations or that it cannot be extended across regions. Indeed, many aspects of practical identity are necessarily trans- portable—skills and expectations in driving, for example, extend not only throughout a nation but across nations. However, even when it is trans- ported to another region, practical identity always involves networks of direct interconnectedness. The political significance of categorial identity—and its complexity, its tendency to generate not only conceptual contradiction but social conflict—is straightforward. Consider one of Rushdie’s most detailed statements on the imagination of national identity: a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will—except in a dream we all agreed to dream . . . India, the new myth—a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivaled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God. (129) The first part of this quote treats the imagination of India, the way that it has been thought into an identity category complete with a history. The part I wish to focus on, however, is the end of the quote. Rushdie names three rival myths: nationhood, money, and God. Though he has not put the point this way—and no doubt he did not self-consciously consider the point in precisely this way—the crucial idea here is that these three terms point to identity categories, specifically the categories of nation, class, and religion. Rushdie names these categories first of all because class and religion are two of the most divisive forces in inde~ pendent India. They are rivals to nationhood in that they tend to under-Patrick Colm Hogan mine or displace nationality as the primary and definitive categorial iden- tity for large numbers of people. For example, people’s identifications as Hindu or Muslim are potentially in sharp conflict with their identifica~ tion as Indian, (A final major force against Indian national unity is re- gionalism. However, that does not merit separate mention in this passage because regional identification is simply a form of national identifica tion, aligned with a different geography and citizenship.) The political significance of categorial identity is clear in part be- cause we are used to thinking of politics by reference to identity cate- gories anyway. Thus we think of political action as bearing on the revolutionary struggles of a class, the civil rights agitation of a religious minority, and so on. Indeed, in our tacit understanding, standard poli- tics—whether focused on class, nation, religion, sex, race, sexual orien- tation—are almost invariably a matter of (categorial) identity politics. Practical identity, in contrast, may appear apolitical, a matter of so- cially inconsequential habits. But this is untrue. Indeed, postcolonization societies present us with a series of nonstandard politics bound up with practical identity. Writers and activists with a political orientation of this sort tend to repudiate identity categories, or at least to subordinate them to cooperative interactions. In keeping with this, they tend to eschew transgeographical imagination, stressing instead local practices. The co- operative movement in Ireland is a good case of this sort, for activists such as Horace Plunkett and AE set out to shape and reorient local, prac- tical identities in such a way as to foster the material well-being of those involved without recourse to national or other identity categories and the antagonisms they entail (Lyons 207-10). This was the impulse be- hind “constructive swadeshi”—the nonconfrontational fostering of local industry—advocated by Tagore as an alternative to the nationalist, anti- British (and, in Tagore’s view, anti-Muslim) “negative” swadeshi of boy- cotting foreign goods (Sarkar 32-33). It is the politics implicit in the boiteko and other self-help and cooperative projects of Botswana (Eiler- son 122), treated by Bessie Head in A Question of Power and When Rain Clouds Gather. It is also to a great extent the politics of anarchosyndical- ism and left-wing communism. Perhaps the most famous instance of such local politics of practical identity is Mahatma Gandhi. In the West, we hear of Gandhi primarily as an advocate of nonviolence. However, at the time of India’s indepen- dence, Gandhi’s primary conflict with Nehru concerned the nature ofMidnight's Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity the new nation. As de Bary, Hay, and Qureshi point out, “Nehru’s ideal India was a centralized modern state with a planned industrial econo- may,’ while “Gandhi's ideal India was a decentralized family of self-suffi- cient villages” (343). However, in a way, even this depiction is misleading, for Gandhi would not have seen his localism as primarily “decentral- ized” and thus defined against a transgeographical nation, understood as primary and definitive. For Gandhi, transgeographical centralism is the oddity; localism is the norm, Thus he wrote that government “control gives rise to fraud, suppression of truth, intensification of the black mar- ket and artificial scarcity” (359). When Louis Fischer asked him if “there would... be a national government” in his perfect India, Gandhi just said “No.” Fisher pressed the point, stressing the transgeographical infra structure of the modern nation: “But surely you need a national admin- istration to direct the railroads, the telegraphs and so on.” Gandhi replied, “TI would not shed a tear if there were no railroads in India” (294). Neo-Gandhians, stich as Ashis Nandy, have developed an analytic approach to political conflict effectively based on a focus on practical identity (though, like Rushdie, they do not formulate the point in these explicit terms). Thus, in Creating a Nationality, Nandy and his coauthors argue that nationalist modernism has intensified communalist conflict in India. This seeming paradox makes sense once one recognizes that na- tionalism and communalism are both products of categorial identifica tion. In contrast, communalist conflict has been curbed only by the local traditions of Hindus and Muslims living in mutual dependence. In other words, it has been curbed by the “normal rhythms of community life” (175), a centuries-old “integration” of “lifestyle, cultural concerns and manners” (181), including “traditional social and cultural ties crossing re- ligious boundaries, as these boundaries are conventionally defined with- in the modern sector” (22-23). Thus, in many places, “Hindu festivals and rituals are inconceivable without Muslim craftspersons” and vice versa. For instance, in one area, Muslim “women make the mandatory lac ban- gles for Hindu married women” (126). As one interviewee, Bhole Singh, puts it, “Why is it that there is no difference between Hindus and Mus- lims when we work alongside in the fields or when they come to thatch our roofs, but when there is a riot they suddenly become our enemies fit to be killed?” (178). In our terms, a religious riot occurs when cate- gorial identities have become a central motivating force for a wide range of people—due to the transgeographical agitations of sectarian politi-Patrick Colm Hogan cians, the general foregrounding of categorial identity in the modern nation, and so on. In contrast, communal farming (“work alongside in the fields”) is a perfect instance of the integrated practical identities of ordinary people in local communities—practical identities that once served, and may serve again, as a counterforce to divisive categorial iden- tities. Empirically, the point is well supported. For example, citing social psychological research, Duckitt points out that communal work in egal- itarian conditions significantly reduces in-group/out-group division and conflict (144-46, 252, and 258). As we shall see, this view of practical identity is closely related to Rushdie’s account of Kashmir. Rushdie’s Gandhian imagination Before going on to Kashmir, however, we should say something about Rushdie and Gandhism. It is a commonplace of Rushdie criticism that Rushdie paid little attention to Gandhi. Brennan points out that Gan- dhi’s National Movement is “impertinently excised from the narrative outright” (84). This is usually taken to mean that Gandhi is not terribly important for the novel. Indeed, Harrison goes so far as to suggest that “Rushdie ignores Gandhi” because Gandhi was excessively Hindu, and thus objectionable from Rushdie’s point of view (15). No doubt there is complexity and ambivalence in Rushdie’s attitude toward Gandhi. But it seems unlikely that his main view of Gandhi is critical, for if it were, he would not ignore Gandhi but subject him to the same thorough crit- icism to which he subjects many other leaders. Moreover, he would not have such an admirable character as Aadam Aziz deeply lament Gandhi's death (169). In fact, Midnight's Children is in many ways a Gandhian novel. In qualifying Rushdie’s criticism of communism, I noted above that Rushdie parodies all political alternatives in Midnight’s Children. But that is not quite true. There is little parody of Gandhi. Indeed, I suspect that Rushdie passed over Gandhi’s role in history because the nature of the novel would have forced him to treat that role parodically. He had to leave Gandhi out of the novel in order to allow the narrative to incor- porate Gandhism. Goonetilleke is one of the few critics to have recog- nized the significance of Gandhi for Midnight’s Children. As he puts it, “The text has it that heroes are a rarity; only Gandhi measures up to one” (32).Midnight’: Children; Kashmir and the Politics of Identity We have already discussed Rushdie’s claim that Gandhi died at the wrong time, with its clear implication that Gandhi should have lived to lead the new nation—presumably in a different direction from the one it ultimately took. This is far from the only point at which Gandhi’s pres- ence is palpable in the nothingness of the novel’s history. For example, at a crucial point, when the Midnight Children’s Conference is disinte- grating, Saleem appeals to the other children, urging them to reject cat- egorial identity:““Do not permit the endless duality of . .. them-and-us to come between us!” He cries “passionately” that they “must be a third principle” (306). Saleem goes on to indicate that categorial identity rei- fies us, reduces our ongoing, multiple, unfixable selfhood to mere ob- jects. He protests in vain that “people are not things” (307); earlier, he explained that “a human being, inside himself, is anything but a whole, anything but homogeneous; all kinds of everywhichthing are jumbled up inside him, and he is one person one minute and another the next” (283). Shiva, implicitly recognizing the pervasiveness of categorial iden- tity in modern society, snorts in disagreement, “Today, what people are is just another kind of thing.” Saleem feels himself “crumbling”—like India, with its multiple conflicting identities—and responds by invoking the Upanishadic unity of souls, which he tacitly associates with Gandhi. He names this third principle, the “hope” offered by the children of mid- night: “the great soul, otherwise known as mahatma, of mankind” (307). Shortly after this, Saleem worries that the children have begun to “dis- cuss identity” and have chosen to contrast Gandhi and Marx (307). On the next page, he says that the third principle “is childhood,” and mourns the fact that “it dies; or rather, it is murdered” (308). Childhood is, of course, metaphorically murdered by the guidance and example of adults. But in light of what just preceded this statement, one might wonder if this third principle was murdered in a more particular and historical way by Nathuram Godse, whose fanaticism for Hindu identity led to Gan- dhi’s death “at the wrong time” (198). Of course, Gandhi’s death was not the end of Gandhism in India. Acharya Vinobha Bhave had remarkable success in establishing local Gan- dhian socialism, without violence, antagonism, the clash of identities. Sa- leem explains that Bhave “had spent ten years persuading landowners to donate plots to the poor.” Just after Bhave “announced that donations had passed the million-acre mark,” Saleem is clipping words from the newspaper. In a pun that is typical of allegorical technique, in Rushdie 593Patrick Colm Hogan and elsewhere, Saleem explains that J. P. Narayan’s announcement of “the dedication of his life to Bhave’s work ... gave me my much-sought “WAY” (312). Literally, he is referring only to the word “WAY” appearing in the headline. But it is clear that the ambiguity of the phrase is fully intended by Rushdie, and that Bhave’s Gandhian work does provide Saleem with his way (not, perhaps, the way he actually manages to follow, but the ideal, the possibility).! This is not to say that Rushdie is a full-fledged Gandhian. He is not. Indeed, he seems to recognize that the sort of localism envisioned by Gandhi is no longer possible, that the local has already been taken up into larger, transgeographical, political structures. That transformation is part of modernity and cannot be reversed. Moreover, modernity, as pre- sented in Rushdie’s novel, leads inexorably toward a conflict of different categorial identities—national, subnational (regional), religious, economic. The Midnight Children’s Conference (MCC) briefly presents a possible solution to all these problems. For what Saleem tries to establish through telepathy is a sort of transgeographical, modern localism. He in effect seeks to reestablish practical identity within the modern context of rival categorial identities. His mind, where all the children meet, becomes the site for a different sort of local, practical engagement. The idea here is not dissimilar to, for example, Donna Haraway’s vision of a “cyborg” culture in which a global computerized network links us all in direct, practical ways, mimicking the localism of practical identity and undermining oppressive identity politics. It is also connect- ed with the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, most obviously his insistence that the world was becoming a “global village” (though also his conten- tion that “When our identity is in danger, we feel certain that we have a mandate for war” [McLuhan and Fiore 97]). Indeed, Saleem’s telepathy is, in effect, an early form of the very technologies treated by these writ- ers: I heard, at first, a headful of gabbling tongues, like an untuned radio. .. . By sunrise, 1 had discovered that the voices could be controlled—I was a radio receiver, and could turn the volume down or up; I could select individual voices; I could even, by an effort of will, switch off my newly-discovered inner ear. (192-93) The chapter that introduces the children through Saleem’s mind is enti- tled “All-India Radio.”Midnight’s Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity However, there is an important difference between Rushdie and these other writers. The MCC disintegrates. It falls prey to the divisive identi- ty categories for which it was to serve as an alternative. It seems that the subordination of practical identity to categorial identity is an inevitable outcome of modernity, and that modernity itself is inexorable. On the other hand, the triumph of modernity is not all bad. Rush- die does not romanticize the traditions of practical identity. Quite the contrary. Unlike Gandhi, Rushdie clearly feels that modernity brings open-mindedness and liberality—and material benefits such as medicine (so well represented in the character of the physician, Aadam Aziz). It is important, and valuable. That is why Rushdie tries to salvage national identity, at least in imagination, through the institution of a transgeo- graphical practical identity, a sort of national localism, in the MCC. Indeed, it is worth dwelling on the MCC a little longer, for in the development of this idea, Rushdie’s use of allegory interacts with his po- litical aims in particularly complex ways. In general, I believe that alle~ gory is simply a technique Rushdie uses, with no necessary thematic consequences. After all, he could have used the same technique to make different points or other techniques to make the same points. But here the relation between allegorical technique and political themes is conse- quential. In personifying the nation, Rushdie is following a standard al- legorical practice, which is itself a standard part of more general national metaphorics: the assimilation of the nation to a single human being. The purpose of such an assimilation is to give imaginative unity to a great diversity of places and individuals. Personification serves to provide a way of envisioning this diversity as one perceptual form, of identifying with it as a unique subject, of understanding it as a purposive intentional agent, and so on—all things we cannot do with a great expanse of space and its unknown inhabitants. Personification works well for this purpose, and for the sorts of categorial identification that go along with it. But its very singularity seems to contradict both democratic pluralism and prac- tical identity, which presuppose multiplicity. This leads to Rushdie’s fas- cinating conceit of the MCC. By placing the multiplicity inside Saleem’s (singular) mind, Rushdie tries to reconcile these apparent contradicto- ries. Moreover, he does this not only to preserve the allegorical tech- nique and maintain practical diversity. He is also, and conversely, seeking, to preserve some degree of national connectedness, and thereby oppose 525Patrick Colm Hogan the local insularity of practical identities (which all too easily ossify into oppressive rigidity). Nonetheless, despite this partial acceptance of modernity, if | am cor- rect, Rushdie’s deepest political commitments set him against categorial identity in its various forms and against the antagonistic and discrimina- tory distinctions that go along with categorial identities. Indeed, in prin- ciple this includes even “hybrid” categorial identities. It is sometimes assumed in postcolonial theory that hybridity resolves problems of iden- tity politics. But this is not true. Briefly, there are three problems with this view. First, many influential discussions of hybridity do not present a clear account of identification—its nature, genesis, function, and so on. In connection with this, hybridity most often lacks the precision and explanatory value of a theoretically rigorous, technical concept. (The notion of hybridity is associated primarily with Homi Bhabha. I have argued elsewhere that Bhabha’s work does not in general provide an ad- equate theoretical foundation for work in postcolonization literature; see my Colonialism 25-43 and the introduction to Empire.) Of course, the word hybridity is often used in a perfectly clear way to refer to a mixing of different categories. But this leads to a second problem. Hybridity in this sense simply generates an identity category of the usual sort with all the usual consequences for the formation of in-groups and out-groups. For example, insofar as hybridity refers to so-called hyphenated identities, such as Chinese American, then it simply generates a new categorial iden- tity—Chinese American. The same point applies to the more complex mixes that are taken to constitute national identities, such as American, which is not just English, say, or Anglo-German, but combines Italian, Trish, Spanish, Native American, and so on—all to the point of defining a new categorial identity, American. Indeed, one might reasonably ask if there is any national or even ethnic identity that was not, at one point, recognizably hybrid. Finally, many categorial identities are not open to hybridity anyway. One may have ancestors who were rich and ancestors who were poor, ancestors who were capitalists and ancestors who were workers. But one cannot currently be a hybrid rich-poor or capitalist- proletarian. As the mention of class suggests, one result of this strict (if often implicit) opposition to categorial identity is the anticommunism discussed by Booker, for communism stresses class struggle and international pro- letarian unity. The point is clearest toward the end of the novel whenMidnight's Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity Saleem reflects on Picture Singh’s “mime of a rich man refusing to give alms to a beggar”: “something in me objected to Picture’s portrayal . . . of the unrelieved vilenesses of the rich; | found myself thinking, “There is good and bad in all’” (493). Marxists will rightly object that this mis- understands Marxist analysis, which concerns social structure and has nothing to do with the personal morality of the rich or the poor. That is indeed a problem with Rushdie’s treatment of class and of socialism. But Rushdie’ criticism here cannot simply be dismissed as anticommunism. Categorial identity does give rise to this sort of personal denigration and group opposition, however inconsistent that might be with Marxist the- ory (as represented, for example, in the dictum that class origin does not determine class stance). Ifan example is required, one need only cite the Khmer Rouge. Though, as Vickery and others have shown, the scale of atrocities was greatly exaggerated in the West, it is still clear that, in Dem- ocratic Kampuchea, class was asserted as a categorial identity with a ven- geance, in every sense of the word.2 Moreover, as we have been emphasizing, Rushdie’s criticism of class identity takes part in a larger criticism of categorial identity in all its forms. For instance, it is precisely this opposition to categorial identity that led him to oppose Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian centralization so strongly—for in Rushdie’s view, that centralization involved a direct, na- tional intervention in the local, practical identities of ordinary people, most obviously in the sterilization campaign.? It is also this opposition to categorial identity that led to Rushdie’s conflict with a transgeograph- ical, centralizing, authoritarian, categorial Islam. In this way, Rushdie’s position is not so much comparable to that of Cold War liberals, such as John Kennedy, as to such writers as Judith Butler. “I’m permanently trou- bled by identity categories,” Butler writes (14), in words that could have been Rushdie’s. Such categories are “trouble” (14), “instruments of reg- ulatory regimes” (13). She urges instead the possibility of “resistance to classification and to identity as such” (16). Again, Rushdie brings up these issues most obviously at the begin- ning of the book, in the chapters on Kashmir. The bulk of the novel clearly focuses on the imagination of nationhood, thus on a particular case of categorial identity, and on the ways that imagination is fissured into antagonistic religions and classes by the nation’s two great rivals, money and God. But there is something that precedes the imagination of the nation. The dream of India, or any other country, does not arisePatrick Colm Hogan out of nothing. In part, it is the function of the Kashmir chapters to outline the transition to national imagination from what went before: the local, practical identity with its living traditions. This practical iden- tity was displaced by national modernity, but it serves nonetheless as one model for a different sort of national or seminational connectedness, a “third way.” Kashmir: tradition and modernity From the beginning of the first chapter, the general terms of the Kash- mir allegory are clear. Kashmiri tradition—the complex of habits, be- liefs, and attitudes that make up the practical identities of the people—are represented by Tai the boatman. He is the “tie” that binds the present to the past, the people to their customs and to one another; and he is the boatman who, like Charon, ferries to and from the land of the ancestral dead. “Nobody could remember when Tai had been young. He had been plying this same boat, standing in the same hunched position, across the Dal and Nageen Lakes .. . forever” (9). Tai himself tells Aadam, “I have watched the mountains being born,” the time of Siva and Parvati and the Hindu gods; “I have seen Emperors die,” Muslim conquerors, per- haps, longing for Kashmir (“Emperor Jehangir .. . what was the Emper- or’s dying word—I tell you it was ‘Kashmir’ [12]—a purveyor of Muslim categorial identity, longing for the Eden of practical identity); “I saw that Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir” (11).Tai, though now Mus- lim, does not represent only one religion or one political system, for he is timeless. Religions and empires in Kashmir have been located in time; Tai persists through all of them. It is not that tradition lacks an objective history, but it does lack a subjective history. Tradition feels eternal, though of course it is not. That is how Tai can be said to precede religion and empire. In contrast, nations are made of historical stuff; they are self-con- scious about origins and developments. As Rushdie emphasizes, India had never existed “although it had five thousand years of history” (129) — a history formed retrospectively into the story of a nation as part of imag- ining that nation into existence. Aadam, the new man, stands in direct opposition to Tai: “Tai-for- changelessness opposed to Aadam-for-progress” (124). In keeping with the general opposition between seemingly eternal tradition and the his- toricization of modernity and nationhood, Aadam has two weaknesses,Midnight's Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity named by Rushdie on the second page of the text. These are “women and history” (4). History, again, is a weakness because the modern na- tion is self-consciously historical; moreover, as a political entity rather than a communal system of habit and custom, it is continually subjected to the changing complexes of political and social conditions and crises that define history. Women are a weakness because of Naseem. She is the one woman to whom Aadam is drawn (Aadam is not a Lothario), and allegorically, she is the nation—India, as imagined at a particular his- torical moment. To say that Aadam has a weakness for women is to say that he has a weakness for the imagined nation. There are many ways in which Rushdie connects Naseem with In- dia. For instance, later in life, she is known as Reverend Mother, her name recalling Mother India, the Bharat-Mata with whom Saleem con- nects his own “too-many women” (485). Massive, hobbling like the over- burdened land she represents, her face is disfigured by two huge moles (41), perhaps suggesting the face of India, disfigured by East and West Pakistan.* But the most striking link between Naseem and Bharat-Mata occurs in the opening chapter of the novel,“The Perforated Sheet.” This title refers to the way in which Aadam Aziz first sees Naseem. Aadam, a physician, is called on to examine Naseem but can see her only in patches. He is allowed to view just that part which is ailing, and he views it through a perforated sheet. Aadam’s partial and discontinuous views of Naseem mirror anyone’: partial and discontinuous views of a nation, for our experience of a nation is necessarily an experience of bits and piec- es only; we do not sense the whole directly, but imagine it. As Goon- tilleke puts it, “Naseem appears to represent Bharat-Mata (Mother India)—that . . . can be seen, and understood, only in fragments” (22). In this case, the nation is Bharat-Mata as she came to be imagined early in the century, stitched together from British India and the princely states, prior to the idea of Pakistan, which dates from 1930 (Wolpert 316-17): So gradually Doctor Aziz came to have a picture of Naseem in his mind, a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts. This phantasm of a partitioned woman began to haunt him, not only in his dreams. Glued together by his imagination. (23) The link with the nation is indicated not only by the parallel to Rush- die’s subsequent reference to the “dream” of India but even more by the use of the term partitioned. In a novel about the birth of India, any refer- 590Patrick Colm Hogan ence to partition must suggest what happened in 1947, the division of South Asia into India and Pakistan. Here Naseem, India, is imagined as a whole, not India as opposed to Pakistan, but South Asia in its entirety. She is dreamed of as the whole that will be partitioned. In contrast, Sal- eem represents India after 1947. It would make no sense to speak of him as being partitioned. He is one result of partition. Even at this point, then, in the tentative, imagined nature of Naseem’s unity, the unity of what might be called Greater India, there is a hint of the future parti- tion. In keeping with this last point, Naseem represents two ideas. She is not only India but a particular form of identity politics that takes shape concurrently with the incursion of European culture and moderniza- tion. At this level, she represents what I have elsewhere called reaction- ary traditionalism, a vehement rejection of modernity or westernization through the assertion of tradition as a categorial identity.) Naseem, the Reverend Mother, is, in this sense, the uncompromising repudiation of the progress allegorized by Aadam. She is the assertion of tradition as a definitive self-concept—thus tradition that is rigid, uncompromising, ve- hement. (The phenomenon commonly referred to as fundamentalism is a form of such reactionary traditionalism.) She is married to Aadam be- cause modernity and reactionary traditionalism are wedded to one an- other. The latter is a response to the former. The two are inseparable. When the representational identities of nationhood and the disruptive practices of colonial culture invade and threaten the practical identities of tradition, they invariably give rise to a reaction, a defensive response on the part of those who live that tradition. This response consists in an affirmation of an opposed, antimodern representational identity, a defi- nition of self that is irreconcilable with “progress.” It is for this reason that, from the moment Aadam imagines Naseem into a whole, he si- multaneously dreams her as a “partitioned woman”—for the conflicting categorial identities that gave rise to partition, especially those of Hindu and Muslim reactionary traditionalism, were a necessary consequence of the initial imagination.® A social system based on categorial identities almost invariably proliferates such identities, producing more categories and more conflicts. This understanding of Naseem returns us to Aadam. For Aadam too has a dual function. He represents modernity and all that it implies—the imagination of nationhood, with its categorial identity, etc. But at the anMidnight's Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity same time he represents the condition of people who have moved quickly from tradition to modernity, people whose lives began in the practical identities of a colonized country but who have been thrust suddenly into a different set of expectations, ideas, customs. He does not represent a fully modernized generation but a transitional group. He stands for all those who have adopted modernity only after being acculturated to tra- dition—those who are, in consequence, displaced from both camps, not fully at home in either, those who suffer from what I have called alien- ating hybridity (see 17 and 320 of Colonialism; it should be clear that, in my usage, hybridity is not a happy alternative to categorial identity). This condition is best represented by Aadam’ relation to religious belief, a central part of any tradition. Right at the beginning of the novel, we learn that Aadam’s time in Germany has left him estranged from the Kash- miri tradition in which he grew to maturity. But it has not made him German: “he was caught in a strange middle ground, trapped between belief and disbelief ... knocked forever into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve” (6). Unsurprisingly, this internal conflict over religious belief is where Rushdie’s use of myth enters most clearly into the allegory. Kashmir: After the fall It is, of course, no accident that Rushdie named this alienated character Aadam. For he has modeled him on the first man. Most simply, Aadam Aziz represents one sort of beginning, the beginning of modernity in Kashmir, with its particular forms of categorial identity and particular disruptions of practical identity (we shall turn to the history underlying this connection later). But this is not a simple, or simply positive, begin- ning. It is, first of all, a loss of God, an alienation that leaves “Permanent alteration: a hole” in Aziz’s heart or soul (6). Modernity is a sort of Fall, and tradition, practical identity, parallels all the unself-conscious practic- es of innocence that are lost in the Fall. Of course, there is nothing real- ly innocent about tradition. Practical identity is almost invariably mixed up with hierarchies of status, economy, and gender; it almost always in- volves cruelty, hypocrisy, deprivation, pain. Moreover, categorial identity is far from being a uniquely modern phenomenon, as centuries of reli- gious antagonism well attest (and as Rushdie acknowledges, even in the case of Kashmir—for example, when he refers to “Sikandar But-Shikan, 531Patrick Colm Hogan the Iconoclast of Kashmir, who at the end of the fourteenth century destroyed every Hindu temple in the Valley” [371]). But once lost, once replaced by a modern and seemingly irrevoca- ble affirmation of categorial identity—nationalism, reactionary tradition- alism, etc.—then, in retrospect, tradition appears unself-consciously innocent. More important, there is one way in which premodern Kash- mir was Edenic, at least in the common view of the place in the period before and just after partition. I am referring to the relative absence of communalism. Nehru characterized Kashmir as “a mixed but harmon- ised culture” (vii) with a broad acceptance of all religions, “a relative ab- sence of communal feeling” (viii), which is to say, categorial identity, He went on to note that “Even when, after the Partition of India, terrible occurrences took place in Northern India, Kashmir was by and large free from any major conflict” (ix). PR N. K. Bamzai reports that Gandhi visited Kashmir in July 1947 and “was impressed with the communal harmony,” even claiming “that in an India which had become dark all round, Kashmir was the only hope” (669). In keeping with this, Tai, Kash- miri tradition, is killed precisely during the war between India and Pa~ kistan over Kashmir later in 1947. The reason is clear: at that moment the valley entered irrevocably into the modern, historical enmity of na- tions and their various categorial identities. The analogy between Kashmir and Eden is reinforced by Tai’s view— not uncommon in the Valley—that Kashmir is the land to which Jesus turned after the events recounted in the Christian Bible. More striking- ly, the narrative outcome of the Fall also mimics Biblical and Qur'anic accounts, for Aadam Aziz’s fall culminates in his exile from Kashmir, just as the first Adam’s fall is marked by his exile from the Garden. Of course, here as in the story of the Fall, Eden is lost even before this exile. Again like the first Adam, after his fall—after the alienating hybridity produced by his time in Germany—Aadam Aziz’s life in the garden is joyless. No longer experiencing the bliss of innocence, he can only “try and recall his childhood springs in Paradise” (5), for that Paradise is already lost. Aadam Aziz first fully experiences this lapsarian, alienated condition when he bends down to pray one morning and injures his nose. From then on, “he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man” (4). In short, at that moment, he engaged in just the sort of defiance that led to primordial exile. Both the original Adam and, even more clearly, the spirits who fell before Aadam, lost God and bliss because they refusedMidnight's Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity submission of this sort. Indeed, this particular episode in the novel is bound up with the Qur’anic story of Iblis. Iblis was a disbeliever and refused to be submissive to Adam (for example, Ali 2.34) or make obei- sance to him (Ali 320n861)—Adam here understood as representing hu- mankind generally, In short, he refused to worship god or man, This is precisely the refusal of Aadam Aziz “never . . . to kiss earth for any god or man”—the lowercase g in god suggesting the disrespectful unbelief of Iblis. Indeed, the parallel goes further. Ali explains that Iblis derives from a root signifying despair (19n57; this is one of the two editions of the Qur'an used by Rushdie when he composed The Satanic Verses, as noted in the acknowledgments for that book). Aziz teeters on the edge of de- spair from this moment on. For it was precisely “This decision” that “made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber” (4). Indeed, Aziz fi- nally succumbs to this despair at the time of his death. He returns to Kashmir and enters a Hindu temple that stands beside the radio mast— the most ancient tradition of the valley conjoined with the symbol of its modernity. When he dies, his body, like his heart, “shatter{s] . . . beyond all hope” (334). But again, the primary model for Aadam Aziz is not Iblis, It is, rath- er, the first Adam, exiled with his spouse from Eden, just as Aadam Aziz departs with his wife from Kashmir. There is one final point about this parallel that is of crucial importance for what follows. Aadam Aziz’s fall and exile strictly fulfill what Allah proclaims in the Qur’an—that the fall of humankind is precisely a fall into enmity (Ali 2.36). When Adam and Eve descend from Eden, they descend into individual and group conflict, as Ali explains (21n64). This is precisely what happens when Aadam Aziz and his Eve, Naseem, leave Kashmir. Immediately they en- counter the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.” It is after this terrible event of history, when the fall is complete, that Aadam Aziz definitively assumes his own categorial and national identity—the massacre “turned me into an Indian,” he says (40). The massacre can produce this effect because it was already based on categorial and national identity. Thus the fall into group conflict is a fall from practical to categorial identity. This reference to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre leads us to Rush- die’s use of historical particulars in his allegory. However, before going on to this, it is important to note that Naseem fits this use of Qur’anic models as well. Though Naseem reactionary traditionalism develops over the course of the novel, we see it for the first time just before the massa-Patrick Colm Hogan cre. Here too Rushdie conjoins the development of reactionary tradi- tionalism and its categorial identity with the development of modern nationalism and its categorial identity. Naseem criticizes Aadam for his “Burope-returned” (32) ideas and vehemently opposes coming out of purdah. Aadam tells her, “Forget about being a good Kashmiri girl. Start thinking about being a modern Indian woman” (33). The difference is clear: a “good Kashmiri girl” is someone who follows communal tradi- tions and a “modern Indian woman” is someone who breaks with local traditions to assert a countertraditional, nationalized identity. It is in re- sponse to this incursion of modernity and nationalism that Naseem turns tradition into a categorial identity, one to be asserted rigidly. This too is based on the story of the Fall, for what the Fall produces in Adam and Eve is a sense of shame, so that they must cover their bodies (Ali 7:19— 23). The point is bound up with Islamic prescriptions about dress. It is precisely these prescriptions that Naseem asserts, in opposition to her husband’s modern views: You want me to walk naked in front of strange men” (33). Her exaggeration is typical of reactionary traditionalism. Kashmir: Roads to modernity The general patterns we have been considering are, again, only a part of Rushdie’s allegory. As we have already noted, throughout the novel Rush- die structures his characters’ lives by implicit or explicit reference to his- torical particulars. Aadam’s life coincides almost exactly with what Bamzai in his History of Kashmir calls the “Dawn of Modernism” (623). In this regard, Aadam stands for Kashmir itself, or for the modernizing fraction of the Kashmiri population. Specifically, Aadam’s birth and early life co- incide with the unofficial but nonetheless real loss of Kashmiri autono- my to Britain and the economic and cultural opening of Kashmir to India and the rest of the world, thus to the transgeographical space of categorial identity. Aadam is born in 1889 or 1890. This is crucial, for it was in 1889 that the Maharaja, Pratap Singh, was forced to abdicate. He was replaced by a “Council of Regency” that was “appointed by the [Brit- ish] Government of India” and was “subject to the general control of the [British] Resident who was the final referee in all matters” (Bamzai 626). One might reasonably say that modern Kashmir—and thus Aadam Aziz—was born with this abdication. Clearly this was the beginning of a change for Kashmir. Powers of state were largely returned to the ma-Midnight's Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity haraja in 1905, but even then this restoration involved numerous restric- tions and placed ultimate authority in the hands of the British Resident. For instance, constitutionally, “the ‘advice’ of the Resident” had to be “followed whenever offered” (630). This shift in administration had numerous practical consequences. As Bamzai puts it, somewhat prejudicially perhaps, “the Imperial Gov- ernment . .. reduced the Maharaja to a figurehead and itself wielded real powers through the Resident. ... The Resident by actively controlling the administration transformed Kashmir from a medieval to the near- modern age” (631). Several crucial changes occurred at this time. For example, in 1889, Walter Lawrence began the process of Land Settle- ment in Kashmir, However, internal changes of this sort were perhaps less important than the changes that linked the Kashmir Valley with the outside world. According to Lawrence, in 1889, there were no roads in the Valley suitable for wheeled vehicles. In 1890, the first great road was completed, linking Srinagar with Rawalpindi. Because Rawalpindi was a railhead, this linked the Valley with the rest of India (Bamzai 636). Thus modern Kashmir/Aadam could equally be said to have been born when the valley was linked with the outside world. Indeed, this point is extended by the dating of Aadam’s trip to Eu- rope. He is gone to Germany from 1910 to 1915. It is in 1915 that he finds himself alienated from Kashmiri tradition, split into half modern, half traditional. The year 1915 is crucial. That was the year that a second major road was established, this time linking Srinagar with Jammu (637). This is also germane to Aadam’s becoming an Indian. The first road linked Srinagar with what was later to become Pakistan. The second linked it with what was later to become India. Telephone connections were also set up between Srinagar and Jammu during this period. Bamzai summa- rizes the results: “So far living in seclusion,” Kashmiris “now came in close and direct contact with the people living in the rest of India” and with an “increasing influx of European . . . tourists” (637). The relation of this to Aadam is clear. Just as he gradually becomes a “half-and-hal- fer” (13),“‘caught in a strange middle ground” (6), part modern, part tra- ditional, so too does Kashmir. Just as he is increasingly exposed to India and Europe, so too is Kashmir. And, in both cases, 1889 and 1915 are crucial turning points. There are other connections as well. One result of opening Kashmir to the world was a sharp increase in disease, with new illnesses importedPatrick Colm Hogan into the Valley from the rest of South Asia (638). Bamzai stresses cholera in particular and points out that there were epidemics in 1892—shortly after the birth of Aadam and modern Kashmir—and then in 1896, 1902, 1906-07, and 1910 (639). This importation of diseases necessitated the development of medical facilities in the Valley, and a number of hospitals were opened over the following years. In other words, medicine was a particularly important issue in Kashmir at the time, Western medicine in particular. Aadam leaves to study medicine in 1910, the year of the last cholera epidemic mentioned by Bamzai. Here too Aadam is becoming modernized in the particular way Kashmir was becoming modernized— for Kashmir, like Aadam, was acquiring Western medicine during just this time. ‘Ata more literal level, the advancement of Aadam’s European-style education represents broad trends in then-contemporary Kashmir. Be- fore the 1880s, there were no English schools in the Valley. The Mission School began to flourish at the end of that decade, and the State School took up an English curriculum at the same time. This too roughly coin- cided with Aadam’s birth. It is also worth noting that this was the period when mining began in earnest in the Valley. In 1907 the Department of Mining was estab- lished, Precious gems played a significant role in this business. For exam- ple, in 1907, a Major Anderson began mining sapphires. “During the next two years he obtained saphires [sic] to the gross value of Rs. 105,000” (642). These beginnings of industry are also reflected in Midnight’: Chil- dren. Indeed, it is the wealth produced by such developments that allows for Aadam’s education or, allegorically, Kashmir’s modernization. Here Aadam’s mother stands for traditional Kashmir, what has given birth to the modern Kashmir. “This mother, who had spent her life housebound,” like Kashmir, which had been “living in seclusion” (Bamzai 637), “had suddenly found enormous strength and gone out to run the small gem- stone business” (7), much as Kashmir had emerged into contact with the outside world and begun to develop modern industries, including the mining of gemstones. It was this gemstone business “which had put Aadam through medical college” (7), much as this early industrial work in the Valley brought modernity with it, prominently including modern medi- cine. In keeping with this, when Aadam hits his nose against the ground and vows “never again to kiss earth for any god or man,” he sees the blood dripping from his nose as “rubies” (4)—gems once more, the eco-Midnight’s Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity nomic means for his modernization and thus for the loss of tradition that manifests itself in this abjuring of worship. In some ways, the First World War marks a particular intensification of Kashmir’s relations with the outside world. Kashmir trained and equipped units of the State army for service in France, Palestine, and East Africa; and Raja—later Maharaja—Hari Singh “made a personal donation of Rs. 43 lakhs [4,300,000 rupies] to the War Fund” (Bamzai 648). One obvious result of this increasing connectedness to the world outside the Valley is that Aadam and Kashmir become part of India. In- deed, it is just at this time that Aadam’ parents die: “By the time the Indian regiments returned at the end of the war, Doctor Aziz was an orphan” (26). The previous generation passes away, and the new, “mod- ern” Kashmir remains; but equally, that new, “modern” Kashmir is an “orphan,” having no true heritage from Kashmir or Europe. And of course Aadam leaves—the modern fraction of the Kashmiri population leaves behind its past and its isolation. Through exile and through marriage, it is united with greater India. But as this indicates, Aadam represents only a fraction of the Kash- miri people. To say that Kashmir was connected with the outside world, was becoming modern, is not to say that every Kashmiri or even the majority of Kashmiris were doing so. Tradition, practical identity, Tai the Boatman still remained. There is a change, however. Tai’s clothing has become “putrescent” (25). With the coming of Aadam, he has decayed; with the coming of modernity, Kashmiri tradition has decayed. More- over, he develops a skin disease “akin to that European curse called the King’s Evil” (29). What is this illness that is like the King’s Evil but not identical with it? I believe that what afflicted Tai, what afflicted Kashmir, was, so to speak, the maharaja’s evil. For during the same period in which ‘Aadam was piecing together his vision of Naseem/India, during the time when he was becoming an Indian, a Kashmiri independence movement was developing to oppose the maharaja, the British, and their repressive policies. The Amritsar massacre occurred when Indians protested the re- strictions on civil liberties propagated by the Rowlatt Acts. The restric tions themselves should not have surprised Aadam, for civil liberties in Kashmir were severely circumscribed. As Bamzai explains, the British government and the maharaja “took active steps to prevent the infiltra- tion into the State of ‘seditious’ ideas from the rest of the country”; they did so “by preventing the formation of any association, political, social 537Patrick Colm Hogan or even religious, and issuing of a paper in the State” (650). Rushdie tells us that Aadam brought back with him from Heidelberg “copies of Vonwarts and Lenin's What Is To Be Done?” (14). Anyone familiar with Kashmir during this period cannot help but be struck by this detail, for the Kashmiri government “would not tolerate the import of even harm- less magazines of fiction” (Bamzai 651). Bamzai paints a picture of a Fou- caultian panoptical state: “the movements of all visitors of a suspicious nature were closely watched” (651). Sometimes state paranoia was al- most comical:“Every Bengali was a suspect” (651). Despite this,““By 1919,” when Tai’s skin recovered from “the King’s Evil” and Aadam left to become an Indian, “the State was thoroughly permeated with the ideas of freedom and self-rule” (652).Tai’s recovery is perhaps linked with the beginnings of Kashmiri resistance to colo- nial/feudal repression. In 1932, with the help of Sir Mohammed Iqbal, Sheikh Abdullah and others formed the anticommunalist Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference (Vashishth 2). (Sheikh Abdullah and the Muslim Conference are, perhaps, one model for Mian Abdullah and the Free Islam Convocation, presented as an anticommunalist alternative to the Muslim League in Rushdie’s novel.) Before the end of the decade Sheikh Abdullah and others opened the group to non-Muslims, and it became the National Conference. Its program was one of democratic socialism (Bamzai 664-69). In 1946 it launched the Quit Kashmir move- ment against the monarchy and its British backers. We could think of the point this way. The new nationalism in Kash- mir was, in a sense, the development, the modernization, of Kashmiri tradition. It is, in that way, akin to the Midnight Children’s Conference, an alternative modernity. That is why Tai marches to the border in 1947, as India and Pakistan are fighting over Kashmir, and proclaims “Kashmir for Kashmiris” (36). That, Rushdie implies, might have been consistent with Kashmiri tradition. That imagination of Kashmiri nationhood might have avoided the development of communalism and formed a pluralistic nation based on practical identity, escaping the authoritarian categorial identities of reactionary traditionalism, Muslim or Hindu. In any case, whether or not such a society was a real possibility, that is not how things in fact developed. Tai’s alternative vision is part of the nothingness that surrounds all the events of the Kashmir chapters. But by the time Tai greets the opposing soldiers with his defiant cry, the au- tonomous development of Kashmir is no longer possible. The Valley andMidnight's Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity its inhabitants have been bound to the histories of their two powerful neighbors. Their traditional, practical absence of communalism cannot stand up against the communal hatred of India and Pakistan. Tai is shot dead by the opposing troops. The ties that link modern Kashmir to its past are severed; its traditions of harmonious and cooperative practical identity lie dead on the battlefield between two modern nations with their antagonistic identities and authoritarian imaginations. Though Rushdie does not continue with the story of Kashmir, we all know the tragedy that followed—a tragedy only to be expected, giv- en Rushdie’s analysis. The death of Tai, of tradition, of practical identity with its daily life of communal harmony, left Kashmir mired in the en- mity bred by categorial identities based on nation and religion. Of course this is not the whole story. The situation is, always was, more complicat- ed than Rushdie suggests. But this is at least part of the story. This con- flict between an indigenous tradition of practical identity that tends toward harmonization and an alien system of categorial identities that aligns re- ligious affiliation with nationhood in sets of rigid antitheses—Muslim against Hindu, Pakistan against India—this conflict is no doubt one im- portant cause of the pain and cruelty that have been so evident in Kash- mir in recent years. Rushdie returns briefly to Kashmir later in the novel, for Aadam must end his life in the Valley where he was born. Like all the other events in this book, Aadam’s death is no accident. He has traveled back to Kashmir. The Prophet's one strand of hair, the holiest relic of the place, is gone. Some blame India, Hindus. Others blame Pakistan. Once again, Kashmir is rent apart by forces outside and by the identities those forces both manifest and compel. Everywhere there are “riots and burnings of cars” (333), and all this misery over one thin hair of a Prophet, insub- stantial as the boundary that divides one group from another, one iden- tity from another, invisible as the imaginary line that breeds enmity in the fallen world. That is when Aadam dies. But he does not die like a person. He dies as a whole society dies, broken up into inimical parts: “the cracks claimed him . .. the bones disintegrated, and the effect of his fall” —yes, again a fall—‘was to shatter the rest of his skeleton beyond all hope of repair” (334). So in the end, even modern Kashmir is crushed by history and by the enmities of national and communal imagination and by the brute force such categorial imagination can create or sustain. It fractures along communal lines, between the ancient temple and the 539Patrick Colm Hogan modern broadcasting antenna, on a hill that overlooks the anarchy and mourning for a violated Muslim shrine. But the damage is not suffered by Kashmir only. It is suffered by all of India. Here, reading of Aadam’s death amid the riots and hatred over a missing relic, we learn why, hundreds of pages earlier, Saleem announced the first crack, the first break in his fantastical, imaginary oneness, the first fissure in the unity of India—why he announced this in the same paragraph where he recounted the murder of Tai and why he said that there, in his “wrist, beneath the skin” the first crack, almost impercepti- ble, was “like a hair” (36). The fate of Aadam, here as anywhere, is both prologue and warning for the fate of all his children. Socialism and identity But after all our talk of categorial and practical identity, one might still ask if any of this truly responds to Booker’s objections. When Saleem appeals to “love,” to “people-together,” and “children-sticking-together- through-thick-and-thin” (307), doesn’t this serve simply to maintain his own privilege, the opulence of the few and the misery of the many? Isn’t Shiva right when he says that “there is no third principle; there is only money-and-poverty.” when he alludes to the famous section of Cap- ital on the fetishism of commodities, saying “look at Birla, and Tata [In- dia’s major industrialist families], and all the powerful: they make things. For things, the country is run. For things . . . but five hundred million stay hungry. . . . Today, what people are is just another kind of thing” (307). Perhaps the problem here is that Rushdie is not Gandhian enough. His projection of practical identity onto the transgeographic nation-state via the Midnight Children’s Conference displaces not only Gandhi's lo- calism but his socialism as well. From early on, Gandhi insisted that the economic constitution of India and for that matter of the world should be such that no one under it should suffer from want of food and clothing, ... And this ideal can be universally realized only if the means of production of the elementary necessaries of life remain in the control of the masses. These should be freely available to all as God’s air. (231) Later, in a phrase echoed by Rushdie, Gandhi called for “abolishing the eternal conflict between capital and labor.” But he did not advocate simple sanMidnight's Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity denial of the conflict. This abolition, he explained, “means the levelling down of the few rich in whose hands is concentrated the bulk of the nation’s wealth . . . and the levelling up of the semi-starved millions” (284). In an interview, Gandhi was asked, “What is your program for the improvement of the lot of the peasantry?” His response was simple:““The peasants would take the land. We would not have to tell them to take it. They would take it.’ And would the landlords be compensated? “No,” he replied (294). Yet, in saying this, I feel that there is something unfair about criti- cizing Rushdie for opposing categorial identity too narrowly. Categori- al identity has, after all, been central to the worst atrocities of the last two centuries, underwriting genocide and bloody conquests, not to men- tion economic exploitation and social oppression just short of mass mur- der. Moreover, Rushdie has had to suffer serious and painful human deprivation for his commitment to opposing categorial identity, espe- cially that of religion. Finally, an emphasis on the horrors of categorial identity hardly seems misplaced in a treatment of Indian independence when one recalls that, over the course of a few weeks in 1947,a million lives were lost because some people identified themselves as Hindu and others identified themselves as Muslim. Indeed, this new nation, scarred by the unspeakable violence of partition, was the world into which Sal- man Rushdie was born. Like Saleem, he was handcuffed to this history. It appears that Rushdie did underestimate the importance, the necessity, of putting “the means of production . . . in the control of the masses.” But his severe distrust of categorial identity—and his alternative empha- sis on practical identity—seems no less valid and salutary for that. Notes 1, It is important to note, however, that the message Saleem crafts from his newspaper clippings is designed to draw his mother away from Qasim the Red. Bhave’s work provides the “much-sought WAY” not of improving the lives of ordinary people but of drawing supporters away from communism. Indeed, in keeping with Booker’s analysis, one could argue that part of Rushdie’s interest in Gandhi is simply as a foil for Marx. Again, the novel—ike all things hu- man—is not without ambiguity and ambivalence. 2, For instance, the Khmer Rouge allowed full civic rights only to poor and middle peasants and workers, and entirely denied civic rights to the bourgeoi-Patrick Colm Hogan sie (Vickery 81).At some places and times, some factions appear to have al- lowed execution on the basis of class standing alone (25, 98-99); they certainly allowed execution for “refusal to adopt in every way the manners and attitudes of simple peasants” (95). Of course, one should not forget the brutality that inspired this fanaticism in the first place—the brutality of the US bombing and of the indigenous elite, Nonetheless, the case seems to bear out Rushdie’s worries about the assertion of class as a categorial identity. 3.The situation may not be as clear as Rushdie indicates. Spear suggests that the problems with the sterilization campaign were not national but local, the central government being blamed “for the excesses of many minor agents and officials” (268). 4.The motif is made explicit for her grandson, Saleem. His teacher, Zagallo, ex- plains that the “stains” on Saleem’ face “are Pakistan”:“Thees birthmark on Pakistan ees a stain on the face of India” (277). 5. I myself would distinguish between modernization and Europeanization (Colonialism 11), but Rushdie seems to identify them. This may result in part from the effective dehistoricization of tradition in the novel. 6. It is worth noting, finally, that Naseem is the daughter of Ghani, a landown- er, one of the Kashmiri elite, but also “a blind man who claimed to appreciate European paintings” (17)—thus an opportunistic imitator of European fashion. Allegorically, one could say that reactionary traditionalism is the child of op- portunistic mimeticism—a common view in postcolonization literature (see chapter 1 of my Colonialism). 7.This massacre is perhaps the most notorious atrocity of British rule in India. Wolpert explains that in response to nationalist agitation against discriminatory laws,“General Dyer banned public gatherings.” Then, “upon learning that a meeting was to be held in Jallianwala Bagh ... Dyer marched his Gurkha and Baluchi rifles across the narrow entrance to that otherwise walled field and ordered them to open fire without a word of warning. . .. Some four hundred Indians were left dead, and twelve hundred wounded”; these included “men, women, and children” (299). An earlier version of one section of this essay was presented at the annual convention of the Association for Asian Studies in 1999. Lam very gratefull to Ainslie Embree for his comments on that version. I am also very gratefull to Sabina Sawhney and Simona Sawhney for insightful comments on a subse quent draft of the entire piece and for their great help at various stages of its editing and publication. 542Works cited Ali, Maulana Muhammad, trans. and ed. The Holy Qur'an. 2nd ed. Columbus: Ahmadiyyah, Lahore, 1995. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rey. ed. New York: Verso, 1991. Bamaai, Prithivi Nath Kaul. A History of Kashmir, Political, Social, Cultural: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day. Delhi: Metropolitan, 1962. Booker, M. Keith, ed. Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, New York: Hall, 1999. . “Midnight's Children, History, and Complexity: Reading Rushdie After the Cold War.” Booker, Critical Essays 283-313. 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