University of Manitoba Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal

Airbrushed History: Photography, Realism, and Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"
Author(s): EDWARD BARNABY

Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1 (March 2005), pp. 1-16
Published by: University of Manitoba
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44030365
Accessed: 24-07-2019 10:13 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44030365?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
University of Manitoba is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal
This content downloaded from 14.139.242.147 on Wed, 24 Jul 2019 10:13:42 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Informed by Rushdie's non-fiction, the social history of photography in India, and the work of Debord and Sontag,
in this reading of Midnight's Children, I contend that Rushdie uses fictional photographs to stage a realist satire
of colonial and nationalist ideologies, thus countering various attempts to label Midnight's Children as magic
realism or exoticism.
Airbrushed History:
Photography, Realism, and
Rushdie's Midnight's Children
EDWARD BARNABY
Mahatma Gandhi and the caption "think different" elicited a vehement con-
A Mahatma mediademnation
demnation
from campaign GandhiDismayed
Salman Rushdie. fromthatSalman
such for and Macintosh
a complex and enigmat-the Rushdie. caption Dismayed computers "think different" that that such featured elicited a complex a a vehement photograph and enigmat- con- of
ic figure, one who opposed the technological modernization of India, should be
reduced to visual shorthand for an imperialist narrative of progress, Rushdie offered
the following lament: "[Gandhi] has become abstract, ahistorical, postmodern, no
longer a man in and of his time but a free-floating concept, a part of the available
stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reinvented,
to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth" ( Step 166).
This induction of Gandhi's image into the catalogue of corporate clip art is a vivid
symptom of the "society of the spectacle" featured in the title of Guy Debord s 1967
Situationist work. Debord astutely observes the manner in which the proliferation of
images in industrialized society has evolved into the production of false realities. For
Mosaic 38/1 0027- 1276-05/00 10 16$02.00©Mosaic
2 Mosaic 38/1 (March 2005)
Debord, a veil of images has been drawn between the individual and an authentic expe-
rience of time and history, thus concealing capitalist transformation beneath an emerg-
ing cultural amnesia and subjecting society to accelerating cycles of consumption.
The manipulation of photographs as part of the spectacle's validation of ideolo-
gy and commodification of culture is a recurring motif in both the political history of
India and Rushdie's non-fiction. Thus the photograph plays a substantial role in
framing Rushdie's critique of spectacle, and it is through Situationist critiques of pho-
tography articulated by Susan Sontag and John Berger that Rushdie has been most
influenced by Debord's discourse. Sontag and Berger both echo the vocabulary of
Debord's concept of détournement, the process whereby the "despotism of a fragment
imposing itself as the pseudo-knowledge of a frozen whole" is restored to "its context,
its own movement and ultimately the overall frame of reference of its period"
(Debord 145-46). In On Photography, Susan Sontag describes the photograph simi-
larly as a "fragment," a "quotation [. . .] open to any kind of reading," falsely regarded
as a "piece of reality" (71, 74). Just as Debord accuses the spectacle of naturalizing a
socially conditioned way of seeing, Sontag writes that "photographs have become the
norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of
realism" (87). It is through photography, Sontag concludes, that "history is converted
into spectacle," "people become customers of reality," and "every subject is depreciated
into an article of consumption [and] promoted into an item for aesthetic apprecia-
tion" (1 10). Applying the concept of détournement to photography, Berger argues that
photography must be represented in a "radial system" of words and other images to
ensure that it serves as a contextual aid to social and political memory and is not used
to construct a linear narrative that substitutes in a fascist manner for memory (292-3).
What has not been so clearly understood is that this discourse on photography
and spectacle informs Rushdie's fiction as well. In spite of the context provided by
Rushdie's essays, the critical response to Midnight's Children has struggled to discern
the novel's relationship to imperialist ideology and often suggests that the novel con-
tributes, even if unwittingly, to the spectacle of India as an exotic "other." Certain
postcolonial theorists regard the European geographical location and educational tra-
dition from which Rushdie writes as grounds to disqualify his portrayal of Indian
society as participating in the imperialist gaze, while others have indicted Rushdie's
participation in a capitalist publishing scheme that markets Anglo-Indian writers
within the discourse of the exotic (see Barnett and Huggan). Some have even ques-
tioned whether fictional critiques of imperialism are capable of prompting an ethical
response from the reader or simply reinforce the spectacle of empire (see Rosaldo and
Ahmad). Graham Huggan, for one, seems to recognize Rushdie's attempt to parody
Edward Barnaby 3
the colonial situation, yet dismisses this political gesture as "vulnerable to recupera-
tion" insofar as the uncritical reader could potentially be drawn into "rehearsing a
continuing history of imperialist perceptions of an 'othered' India" (81).
Rushdie's depiction of visual culture in Midnight's Children , however, achieves
precisely the opposite effect, portraying how the spectacle was operative in both the
colonial vision of India held by the Raj and the nationalist vision of India advanced
by the independence movement. Often read misleadingly as fantasy or magic realism
through a strictly postcolonial lens, Midnight's Children is more holistically under-
stood as a realist satire of the neuroses of an Indian man who becomes convinced by
the competing imagery and rhetoric of the spectacles of imperialism and nationalism
that the events of his life mirror the historical narrative of modern India. To discredit
Rushdie's abilities as a satirist precisely because of his access to the tradition of social
realism in the European novel, or because the imperceptive reader might take too lit-
erally the more ironic or grotesque moments of the text, exhibits a certain willingness
to misunderstand Rushdie's politics and his fiction. In order to gauge what Huggan
regards as the novel's lack of "oppositional power" (71), perhaps clearer definition is
needed as to what exactly Midnighťs Children opposes. The narrative voice of this
novel openly comments on the falsification of reality through propagandistic con-
structions of history. The novel in general satirizes the fascist spectacle of British cul-
tural superiority that the Raj foisted upon the historical memory and visual culture of
India during its occupation. Furthermore, it satirizes the way in which these dynam-
ics were then adopted and perpetuated by India's own nationalist movement.
Rushdie accomplishes this by "replaying" for the reader (to use Anuradha
Needham's term) the struggle of an Indian man to find meaning and authentic experi-
ence among these competing unrealities. Needham observes that it is typical for writers
of a diaspora to advance "reconstructions [that] contest and/or call into question the
truth of the dominant, colonial histories of their 'homelands'" (15). However, because
Saleem's narrative straddles the transfer of power in India from the British to the
nationalists, the dominant discourse Rushdie "replays" undergoes a similar shift. Rush-
die attempts to demonstrate how nationalist discourse perpetuates the spectacle first
introduced under colonial rule by replaying both discourses for the reader. As a result,
exclusively postcolonial readings of Midnighťs Children are susceptible to interpreting
Rushdie's "replaying" of the nationalist spectacle not as satire, but as sympathy for the
colonizers.
This technique of "replay" aligns with various theorizations of realism by critics

such as Georg Lukàcs, Philip Rahv, and Pierre Macherey in which fiction allows the
reader to encounter ideology in a broad historical context that deconstructs its otherwise
compelling internal logic. Macherey regards realism not as a naturalistic aesthetic, but as
a rhetorical mirror that foregrounds the incompleteness of any representation of reality.
For Macherey, realist fiction makes possible an "escape from the domain of spontaneous
ideology, [ . . . ] from the false consciousness of self, of history, and of time" by perform-
ing various ideologies within the text and establishing them "as visible objects" (132,
133). Philip Rahv similarly argues that "the kind of casuistry which may easily pose for
truth within the pseudo-context of a political speech or editorial will be exposed in all
its emptiness once it is injected into the real context of a living experience, such as the
art of fiction tries to represent" (303). It is precisely this function of realism that David
Price identifies as Rushdie's achievement in Midnight's Children when he writes, "The
power of governments to manipulate images and information is so immense and the
reservoir of the cultural semiotic so deep that the writer remains one of the few
people who can construct an entire narrative in opposition to [...] unidimensional,
simplistic, reductive, slogan-laden messages" (105). Each of these statements parallels
realism with Debord's concept of détournement as a means of exposing the dynamic of
spectacle by reinserting the totalitarian visions of various ideologies within the contin-
gency and subjectivity of an historical context.
Rushdie, in fact, identifies himself as a realist. Theoretically, he aligns himself with
the likes of Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and John Berger in regarding realism not
as a representational convention, but as an ethic that compels an artist to "attempt to
respond as fully as possible to the circumstances of the world in which the artist works"
(Rushdie, Imaginary 210). Stylistically, Rushdie acknowledges his attempt to model
Midnight's Children after the Dickensian novel, in which, he observes, "details of place
and social mores are skewered by a pitiless realism, a naturalistic exactitude." It is, in
Rushdie's words, "against a scrupulously observed social and historical background -
against, that is, the canvas of a 'real' India" that he pursues his satire of India's grotesque
political and historical narrative ( Step 64).
Those generic blinders

who blinders
on theseek
text tothatonultimately
define theobscure
text Midnighťs thatonultimately
its discourse spectacle andChildren obscure as fantasy its discourse or magic on realism spectacle place and
inscribe the novel within the very terms of otherness and exoticism that Rushdie
attempts to expose. Peter Brigg reads Midnighťs Children as a fantasy that Rushdie
constructs in order to subvert the self-legitimizing rationalism of colonial ideology
with a more mythical and anthropomorphic view of history told by an individual
(127). Brigg's analysis, however, overlooks the psychological realism of the narrator
Saleem's narcissistic relationship to history during his childhood. Rushdie has noted
that "the idea of placing Saleem center-stage in so many political events came to him
Edward Barnaby 5
because a child usually sees himself center-stage" (Parameswaran 40). Furthermore,

the adult Saleem's rigorously theorized relationship to history as various combinations
of "active" and "passive," "literal" and "metaphorical" influences between the micro-
cosm and macrocosm represents a concerted effort on Rushdie's part to maintain a
connection between Saleem's often logistically strained narrative and an objective
social reality (Rushdie, Midnight's 286).
Indeed, Rusdie refuses to allow Saleem to stray into the self-affirming confines of
myth and fantasy. Even Saleem's least fantastic assertions are undercut with allusions
to his unreliability, including admissions of lapses in judgement, misremembered
facts, outright lies, and failing sanity. Any foray into the fantastic by Saleem is quickly
circumscribed by his companion Padma, whose impatience for the abstract and
improbable has been described as the "realistic and tangible foil so necessary to keep
the narrative to the ground" (Parameswaran 44). Rushdie once explained to a BBC
director charged with adapting the novel for the screen that "many of the novel's
apparently 'magical' moments had naturalistic explanations" and that "however highly
fabulated parts of the novel were, the whole was deeply rooted in the real life of the
characters and the nation" ( Step 72).
Saleem's overtly unreliable narrative also calls into question readings of Midnight's
Children as magic realism. A defining trait of magic realism is that its supernatural ele-
ments are "admitted, accepted and integrated into the rationality and materiality of lit-
erary realism" (Zamora and Faris 3). Saleem's self-confessed instability and Padma's
constant objections to the outlandish, however, establish a clear antagonism between
the real and the surreal in Midnight's Children . In fact, this antagonism between reality
and the various idealizations of history circulating throughout India are central to the
novel's critique of spectacle, a critique that is obscured when certain scenes are cited out
of context as instances of magic realism.
Wendy Faris, for example, identifies "verbal magic" and literalized metaphors as
traits of magic realism and points to Saleem's propensity for hearing the voices of the
other children of midnight in his head as a symptom of these traits (176). However,
this unnecessarily exoticizes what is more compellingly read from the realist stand-
point as a satire of the neuroses wrought by the nationalist movement's monumen-
talist historical narratives. One must not forget that Saleem grows up in the shadow
of a ceremonial letter that Nehru sent to Saleem's mother on the occasion of his birth
and which hangs on the wall of his nursery. With inflated political rhetoric, Nehru ele-
vates to symbolic status the life of this child who happens to be born on the midnight
of the transfer of power from the British, thus converting Saleem into an image of
unity within the spectacle of nationalism. Rushdie's satire illustrates what happens
when Saleem accepts the spectacle of nationalism as a literal and objective social real-
ity. Saleem becomes a repository for the competing voices, beliefs, and traditions of
individuals who are portrayed in Nehrus rhetoric as the unified and independent
India. By the end of the novel, Saleem's psychological strain and the appearance of
cracks on his skin (that only he can see) signal his inability to live out this nationalist
identity.
Faris identifies an attitude of "freshness" and "childlike" innocence towards the
world as another trait of magic realism, one which she locates in the simple pleasure
Aadam Aziz takes in observing the spring day in the Kashmir at the opening of the novel
(177). Such a reading, however, disregards the imperialist context of this scene, namely
Aadam s recent return from Europe after studying medicine in Germany for five years
and the narrator's nostalgia for a time when the landscape was not scarred by war.
Rushdie's point is not that Aadam and the narrator somehow maintain a magically
childlike relationship with nature in spite of their experiences. Not only does the narra-
tor observe that the pristine landscape before Aadam's eyes in 1915 would later be oblit-
erated by the tread of soldiers, but he also notes that, even then, Aadam had come to
view this landscape as provincial and stifling upon his return from the West {Midnight's
5). It is significant, however, that Rushdie anchors his critique of the spectacle in
Midnight's Children with this deconstruction of the picturesque landscape, an aesthetic
convention that has been widely associated with the visual culture of imperialism. He
"replays" this trope of landscape description with an irony that is not lost upon those
familiar with similar scenes at the onset of many a British and European novel.
Far from countering Western rationalism with Eastern mysticism (and thus pan-
dering to the very binary social formulations the text strives to move beyond), Mid-
night's Children performs "the secularization of the magical religion of fate into the
realistic science of psychology" that Fredric Jameson identifies as a symptom of the
generic shift from romance to realism ("Magical" 144). Rushdie embodies the Indian
predicament in the neuroses and insecurities of a child whose auspicious birthdate has
thrust him into a battle for hegemony between a collapsing colonial historical narra-
tive and the equally surreal nationalist fiction that supplanted it. Thus Rushdie has
internalized within Saleem what Jameson describes as the hallmark of realism, name-
ly "a society torn between past and future in such a way that the alternatives are
grasped as hostile but somehow unrelated worlds" ("Magical" 158). Those who are
quick to deny the realism of this text, however, tend to focus on Jameson's pronounce-
ment in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act that realism is
characterized by "containment strategies" that naturalize the experience of capitalist
culture and thus render the text complicit in the formation of the spectacle (193).
Edward Barnaby 7
Haunted by Jameson (and often paraphrasing his ideas), these critics attempt to cat-
egorize Midnight's Children as magic realism and fantasy out of some perceived need
to insulate the novel from any claims that its realism reinforces the spectacle instead
of critiquing it. The later Jameson of The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the
Postmodern , 1983-1998 , however, leaves open the question of whether all realist rep-
resentation has been commodified to the extent that it is no longer capable of for-
mulating a critique of its own production (20). Furthermore, it is the indiscriminate
use of the term magic realism , as Stephen Slemon suggests, that ultimately produces
this naturalizing effect by "offer [ing] centralizing genre systems a single locus upon
which the massive problem of difference in literary expression can be managed into
recognizable meaning in one swift pass" (408).
Rushdie'sto toraiseraiseconsciousness
consciousness self-proclaimed
of the of the realism
epidemic of spectacle in our epidemic coupled times"
"image-saturated of spectacle with his in consistent our "image-saturated attempts elsewhere times"
suggests that the presence of photography in Midnight's Children participates in the
satire of colonial and nationalist ideology in India. Why, for example, does Saleem's
grandmother Naseem, also known as the Reverend Mother, react so violently to having
her photograph taken? Is this merely the local colour of a tall tale through which
Rushdie depicts the quaintness of oral culture? Is Naseem a superstitious native whom
Rushdie invites us to join him in ridiculing? Or is it more consistent with Rushdie's
body of work to suggest that he identifies photography in this scene as an agent of the
spectacle that inscribes India within a Western technology of representation? Rushdie
himself intimates the latter, explaining that this scene suggests "something predatory
about photography" and comparing the Reverend Mother's instinct to resist the pho-
tographer to Princess Diana's fatal attempt to flee the voyeuristic lenses of the paparazzi
(Step 104, 109-110).
The turbulent marriage of Saleem's grandfather, Aadam Aziz, and Naseem is no
ordinary narrative of domestic squabbling, but pits nothing less than the integrity of
Indian society against European cultural imperialism. These characters perform a func-
tion that Georg Lukàcs regards as the achievement of the historical novel, namely that
social forces in conflict are "brought into a human relationship with one another [. . .]
whose clash expresses artistically a great crisis in society" (36). The Reverend Mother's
refusal to sit for the photographer Aadam commissioned to take portraits of his fami-
ly must be read against the backdrop of a growing tension between Naseem's traditional
Indian upbringing and certain Western attitudes toward science, sex, and politics that
Aadam adopted while studying medicine in Heidelberg. Although Aadam returns to
India after five years in Germany because he is offended by the ethnocentrism of his
European friends, he has nevertheless been acculturated by the West and is somewhat
alienated from his native country. Emblazoned with the word Heidelbergy Aadam's
medicine bag becomes a divisive visual icon within his small town. He burns Naseem's
veils to force her to abandon the purdah against her will and become a more sexual-
ly liberated "modern Indian woman" ( Midnight's 33). He whistles "O Tannenbaum"
while riding his bicycle down the street. Such details cast Aadam's desire to photo-
graph his family as a bourgeois imitation of the European practice of portraiture. In
such a light, the Reverend Mother's stance as "an ironclad citadel of traditions and
certainties" functions not simply as the humorous hyperbole of magic realism, but
signals the reader that her character has assumed a socio-historical dimension.
To comprehend fully the Reverend Mother's indignation, one must have some
sense of the social connotations of the photograph in India that inform Rushdie's
novel. Photography was first introduced to India by the British shortly after its inven-
tion in 1839 for the imperialist purpose of topographical surveying. Photographs also
featured prominently in British travel guides, which served to create a predictable and
repeatable pictorial journey through the subcontinent that rendered India transparent
to Western tourists as an extension of the Empire (32). By the time of the Calcutta
International Exhibition in 1883, the colonial counterpart to London's Great Exhibi-
tion at the Crystal Palace three decades earlier, photography had come to play an
important role in the colonial establishment's ability not only to catalogue data regard-
ing all aspects of Indian society, but also to display its "indexical power" and ability to
"order reality" (Hoffenberg 180; Pinney 266-7). Photography came to be associated in
India with the imperialist "intoxication with precision and exactitude both descriptive
and spatial" and was viewed as complicit in the dehumanizing statistical "efficiency" of
colonial government (Pinney 269).
Sontag illuminates this imperialist aspect of photography in her critique of the
photographer as a "supertourist" and an "extension of the anthropologist" who is per-
petually "visiting natives and bringing back news of their exotic doings" and "trying
to colonize new experience" (42). This perspective enables one to regard the Reverend
Mother's behaviour as driven not by ignorance, fear, or spite, but a deep resentment
of Westernization that sitting for the photographer represents. Sontag observes that
people in non-industrialized countries often resist being photographed as if it were
"some sort of trespass, disrespect, or sublimated cultural looting," whereas people in
industrialized countries (where the spectacle holds sway) tend to feel that they are
"made real by the photograph" and "incorporated into the historical record" (161).
Rushdie embodies this cultural divide in the conflict between Aadam and the Rever-
end Mother. Aadam, in effect, becomes an unwitting agent of the spectacle in his
Edward Barnaby 9
desire to display his wife and children as "life-sized blow-up photographs" on the wall
of his living room, whereas the Reverend Mother regards this as an intolerable degree
of exposure and objectification. Saleem observes that Naseem "was not one to be
trapped in anyone's little black box" and, as if in triumphant defiance of the panopti-
cal gaze of the European lens, notes that "there are no photographs of my grand-
mother anywhere on earth" ( Midnight's 41).
This sentiment was echoed in the decision by India's government in the 1960s to
replace photographs of national monuments in Indian textbooks with pen and ink
drawings. Indian artists were thus enabled to strip the images of any picturesque ele-
ments in the photographs reminiscent of the staged exoticism of landscape photog-
raphy commissioned by the Raj (Chatterjee 283). This effected a symbolic reversal of
publishing practices a century earlier in which picturesque elements not found in
India's landscapes were added by English engravers when adapting photographs to
metal plates for use in British travel literature (Falconer 161). The photography- free
textbooks were intended to undermine the literal interpretation of photographic real-
ism, which might suggest to the spectator that the photograph provides true access to
or even possession of a geographical space and its historical reality (Chatterjee 283;
Sontag 9). Ironically, however, the elimination of any geographical or social context
in the drawings of the monuments transformed them into a sacred iconography that
merely traded the romanticism of the colonial vision for that of the nationalist one.
The picturesque antiquarianism of the state- sponsored photography of the Raj sug-
gested the need for British stewardship of Indias decaying heritage, while the nation-
alists' sublime portrayal of Indian architectural monuments concealed the historical
reality of India's political disunity. In either case, history is transformed into specta-
cle, an opportunistic quotation of reality taken out of context to bolster an ideology.
It is this ambivalent use of India's architectural monuments within successive
spectacles of national fragmentation and national unity that Rushdie satirizes through
Lifafa Das's travelling "peepshow." As an entertainer who peddles his montage of pho-
tographs among small villages throughout India, Lifafa is the embodiment of specta-
cle, exploiting the touristic impulse with his enticement to "See the whole world, come
see everything!" {Midnight's 84). This "world" is comprised entirely of photographs,
principally those of famous sites such as the Taj Mahal, the Meenakshi Temple, and the
Ganges River. Not wanting to insulate his audience from the "not-so-pleasant features
of his age," Lifafa attempts to introduce an element of social realism to his show by
incorporating occasional images of contemporary political figures and scenes of
poverty and social protest. Ultimately, however, any political consciousness in his selec-
tion of photographs is recuperated within the overall commodified voyeurism of the
exhibition. Lifafas inclusion of a publicity photograph of "Carmen Verandah" points

to a latently pornographic aspect of his "peepshow" that aligns it with other visual
spectacles, such as the stereoscope, which had become widely associated in Europe
with the viewing of erotic imagery by the end of the nineteenth century ( Midnight's
84; Crary 127). Like bacchants swept into a destructive frenzy, children swarm around
Lifafa and impatiently clamour to view the images. As Lifafa attempts to pacify them,
a young girl notices some political graffiti that happens to have been painted on the
wall behind him and accuses Lifafa of being a Hindu, whereupon a riot ensues. It is
not the realism of Lifafa's photographs that produces this violent response, as one
might have suspected, but the irrationality of the crowd, desperate to participate in
the spectacle itself.
Although Rushdie has been criticized for "collapsing cultural politics into eth-
nic spectacle" in his novels, it appears that this is precisely the object of his satire in
depicting the character of Lifafa Das (Huggan 67). Saleem's abrupt adoption of the
jargon of a film director to narrate the scene in which Lifafa s peepshow arrives in
Delhi foregrounds the various ways in which visual perception is manipulated within
the spectacle. Saleem decides to shoot the scene from a "foreshortened" aerial per-
spective, presumably to heighten the dramatic effect and provide the reader with a
global view of the events that parodies the claims of the peepshow itself. Saleem's
visual composition of the scene recalls the groundless perspective of many nine-
teenth-century European landscape paintings, an imaginary panoptical vantage
point that has been associated with the imperialist gaze (see Heisinger). The last one
hears of Lifafa is that he has become obsessed with adding more and more photo-
graphs to his collection in a quixotic pursuit of literal realism. Echoing Sontag's cri-
tique of photography as falsely conveying "the sense of holding the whole world in
our hands as an anthology of images" (3), Saleem questions whether Lifafas "urge to
encapsulate the whole of reality" is an "Indian disease" that infects his own narrative
(Midnight's 84).
While on the surface Rushdie seems to blame India for taking Western realism too
literally, Saleenťs question is quite obviously an ironic one. Hardly an Indian disease,
the substitution of photographs for physical and historical reality derives from what
has been described as the "museumizing imagination" that emerged in Europe during
the nineteenth century (Pelizzari 37). Ethnographic studies of India commissioned by
the British East India Company to optimize colonial administration, scholarly studies
of Indian civilization that legitimized British intervention, and travel literature that
commodified India for consumption by British tourists relied heavily on the photo-
graph's apparent realism for their authority (Guha-Thakurta 121; Hoffenberg 191). At
Edward Barnaby 1 1
this time, the photograph enjoyed an aura of objectivity that was not heavily scruti-
nized, as it appeared, in comparison to landscape painting, to be a relatively scientif-
ic means of reproducing reality (Bann 64-5). As a result, one reads of photographs
being praised for their "picturesque" potential and historical "legibility," as in James
Fergusson's 1848 volume titled Picturesque Illustrations of Ancient Architecture in
Hindostán (Guha-Thakurta 123). Exemplifying what Sontag has critiqued as the
photograph's enactment of a "surrealist abbreviation of history," Fergusson con-
structs a romanticized historical narrative of Indian architectural styles years after
returning from his field work in India, a dubious methodology that participates in a
growing trend at the time whereby text and images displaced the authority of direct
site observation (Sontag 68; Guha-Thakurta 123). This reliance on photographs as
an objective historical record becomes even more problematic in light of the nation-
alist movement's appropriation of photographs originally commissioned by the Raj.
For example, British photographs of the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion in 1858,
which were originally taken to document the savagery of uncivilized India, were
eventually incorporated into nationalist history textbooks and recaptioned to vilify
the British occupiers (Gupta 238).
It is this fluidity in meaning of photographic images that Rushdie satirizes through
Saleem's recollection of certain "memories of a mildewed photograph" (Midnight's 45).
Supposedly taken at a meeting of the leaders of an underground pro- independence
organization, the photograph features Aadam Aziz, the Rani of Cooch Naheen, Mian
Abdullah (an activist also known as the Hummingbird), and Nadir Khan (the Hum-
mingbird's personal secretary and a poet). These four were spearheading the formation
of the Free Islam Convocation out of dozens of Muslim splinter groups as a political
alternative to the Muslim League, a Pakistani independence group whom the Rani
describes as "landowners with vested interests to protect [ . . . ] who go like toads to the
British and form governments for them" ( Midnight's 47-8). Saleem recalls specific
visual details from the photograph alongside vignettes of dialogue from the conversa-
tion among those pictured. The visual details he provides, however, directly contradict
his recollection of the conversation. Furthermore, if one is to trust Saleem's memory,
the participants in this meeting spend their time discussing not political strategy, but
the role of social realism in the arts.
Each of Saleem's recollections of the conversation that allegedly took place at the
time of the photograph is contradicted by the image. According to Saleem, the
Hummingbird tells Aziz that he is in great shape and asks Aziz to punch him in the
stomach, yet Saleem notes that the "folds of a loose white shirt conceal the stomach, and
my grandfather's fist is not clenched but swallowed up by the hand of the ex-conjurer."
Saleem observes that the Rani "was going white in blotches" a phenomenon plausibly
explained as an overexposed negative, the deterioration of the mildewed photograph,
or an actual skin disease. Saleem, however, extrapolates this into a metaphorical symp-
tom of Anglicization, "a disease which leaked into history and erupted on an enormous
scale shortly after Independence." Saleem claims that the Rani described herself to the
others in the picture as "the hapless victim of [. . .] cross-cultural concerns" and her skin
as "the outward expression of the internationalism of [her] spirit." Saleem then recounts
how Nadir Khan shyly described his dabbling in poetry to the others in the picture,
assuring the reader that Nadir's feet "would be shuffling in embarrassment" if they were
not "frozen by the snapshot" (Midnight's 46). Indeed, one is never told how Saleem has
become privy to what is discussed at the meeting, as the photograph certainly cannot
provide this information and the meeting occurred before he was born.
Perhaps even more curious is Saleem's claim that these characters, having con-
vened to discuss the future of their controversial political organization, were purport-
edly debating the merits of social realism in modernist poetry. Just as the photographs
of the Sepoy Rebellion were commandeered to validate both colonial and nationalist
historical accounts, Saleem appears to have recaptioned this photograph to serve his
own rhetorical strategy in Midnight's Children , namely to focus the reader on issues of
representation. There is, in fact, no visual evidence in the photograph of any conversa-
tion or debate, with each character described by Saleem as wearing a "foolish, rigid
smile." Saleem refers to the four as consummate ventriloquists whose non-moving lips
he must attempt to read within the photograph's "still, immobile scene." Saleem ulti-
mately exhausts his memory of the image, declaring that "the photograph has run out
of words" C Midnight's 46). The ambivalence of Saleem's ekphrastic account of this fic-
tional photograph dramatizes Sontag's critique of photography in general as "open to
any kind of reading" as well as her argument that "only that which narrates can make
us understand" (Sontag 71, 23).
One could accept the account of this photograph at face value as an absurdist ges-
ture or evidence of Saleem's magical power to intuit subtexts. It is improbable, however,
that the participants in a clandestine meeting of a subversive political organization
would ever have posed for such a photograph. There is no mention of who took this
photograph, why it was taken, the circumstances under which Saleem once saw it, or
how he came to have such an intimate knowledge of the substance of the meeting itself.
Indeed, not even the more significant event of Mian Abdullah's assassination shortly
after this meeting is preserved in the public record, but is suppressed by the British
authorities and perpetuated only in the local oral culture. From a realistic perspective,
it is quite possible that Saleem invents this photograph (it is present in the novel only
Edward Barnaby 13
through the narrator's memory) in order to endow these marginalized figures, other-
wise known only through small-town gossip, with the aura of historical legitimacy. By
placing them in a photograph, Saleem makes them real within the spectacle and invests
them with the value accorded by Western society to such images.
This photograph, with its forced smiles and tacit tensions, is strongly reminiscent
of propagandistic photographs commissioned by the British East India Company of
various puppet governments and theatre states just like those maintained by the
Muslim League in Midnight's Children. Two such staged photographs in particular
taken by Company photographer Linnaeus Tripe in the mid-nineteenth century
exemplify what Debord has called the "immobilized spectacle of non-history" (Debord
150-51). They portray the Raja with his assembly in a hall decorated in a suspiciously
Victorian style, as well as seated at his desk signing an official order "under the watch-
ful gaze of a Brahman bureaucrat and the colonial state" (Dirks 212). The stiff, forced
aspect of Rushdie's photo of the leaders of the Free Islam Convocation not only paro-
dies the spectacle of propagandistic photography in colonial India, but reminds the
reader that the nationalist movement, described by Saleem as "the optimism epidemic,"
staged its own spectacles as well ( Midnight's 48).
Other totothe
theaspects symptomology
symptomology of visual Rushdie
of the spectacle culture of the spectacle
explores such asChildren
in Midnighťs painting,andRushdie cinema, explores and in Midnighťs architecture Children contribute and
have been admirably explored elsewhere by critics such as Prem Chowdry, Neil ten
Kortenaar, and Michael Trussler. Rushdie relies heavily on the photograph, however, to
stage moments of resistance to the spectacle. This is due, in part, to the historical role
photography has played in the batde for dominance between colonial and nationalist
hegemonies, as well as the strong influence of Debord s account of spectacle on critiques
of photography by Sontag and Berger that have informed Rushdie's work. It is this
recovery of social reality from the distortions of the spectacle that Rushdie strives to
achieve in his fiction and non-fiction, a task that he accomplishes by "replaying" and
satirizing the rhetorical and visual discourses circulating within Indian society.
The Taj Mahal, a widely photographed architectural icon that has served as both
a revered image of national identity as well as the tourist kitsch of countless postcards
and advertisements, is the subject a brief piece in Rushdie's most recent collection of
essays. In encouraging his readers to continue to visit this site in person, Rushdie
appears to corroborate the claims of postcolonial theorists who accuse him of market-
ing India for Western consumption. Far from colluding with travel agencies, however,
Rushdie exhorts his readers to refuse to allow the ubiquitous image - the "million mil-
lion counterfeits" - of this building to substitute for the experience of beholding it in
person. Decades after writing Midnight's Childreny Rushdie is still weaning a world full
of Saleems off of their peepshows, still reminding us "that the world is real, that the
sound is truer than the echo, the original more forceful than its image in the mirror"
(Step 172). Rushdie points us, like Benjamin, to the aura of the original that is lost
among its countless reproductions and, like Deleuze, to the icon displaced within the
modern simulacrum's "triumph of the false" (Deleuze 262). This critique of the cul-
ture of spectacle persists throughout Rushdie's oeuvre and is the basis of any
informed reading of Midnight's Children.
WORKS CITED
Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992.
Bann, Stephen. "Antiquarianism, Visuality, and the Exotic Moment." Traces of India: Photography,
Architecture and the Politics of Representation, 1850-1900. Ed. Maria Antonella Pelizzari. New Haven,
CT: Yale UP, 2003. 60-85.
Barnett, Anthony. "After Nationalism." Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity
(Volume I: History and Politics). Ed. Raphael Samuel. New York: Routledge, 1989. 140-55.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 217-51.
Berger, John. Selected Essays. Ed. Geoff Dyer. New York: Pantheon, 2001.
Brigg, Peter. "Salman Rushdie's Novels: The Disorder in Fantastic Order." World Literature Written in
English 22.1 (1987): 119-30.
Chatterjee, Partha. "The Sacred Circulation of National Images." Traces of India: Photography, Architectur
and the Politics of Representation, 1850-1900. Ed. Maria Antonella Pelizzari. New Haven, CT: Yale UP
2003. 276-92.
Chowdry, Prem. Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema: Image, Ideology and Identity.
Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone, 1995.
Deleuze, Gilles. "The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy." The Logic of Sense. 1969. Trans. Mark Lester.
New York: Columbia UP, 1990. 253-66.
Dirks, Nicholas B. "Colonial Amnesia and the Old Regime in the Photographs of Linnaeus Tripe." Traces of
India: Photography, Architecture and the Politics of Representation, 1850-1900. Ed. Maria Antonella
Pelizzari. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2003. 196-215.
Falconer, John. "Pattern of Photographic Surveys: Joseph Lawton in Ceylon." Traces of India: Photography,
Architecture and the Politics of Representation, 1850-1900. Ed. Maria Antonella Pelizzari. New Haven,
CT: Yale UP, 2003. 154-73.
Edward Barnaby 1 5
Faris, Wendy B. "Scheherazade's Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction." Magical Realism:
Theory, History, Community. Eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham, NC: Duke
UP, 1995. 163-190.
Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. "The Compulsions of Visual Representation in Colonial India." Traces of India:
Photography, Architecture and the Politics of Representation, 1850-1900. Ed. Maria Antonella Pelizzari.
New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2003. 108-39.
Gupta, Narayani. "Pictorializing the 'Mutiny' of 1857." Traces of India: Photography, Architecture and the
Politics of Representation, 1850-1900. Ed. Maria Antonella Pelizzari. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2003.
216-39.
Heisinger, Elizabeth. "Turner and the Representation of England." Landscape and Power. Ed. W.J.T.
Mitchell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. 103-125.
Hoffenberg, Peter H. "Photography and Architecture at the Calcutta International Exhibition." Traces of
India: Photography, Architecture and the Politics of Representation, 1850-1900. Ed. Maria Antonella
Pelizzari. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2003. 174-95.
Huggan, Graham. Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. Florence, KY: Roudedge, 2001.
Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. New York: Verso,
1998.
Kortenaar, Neil ten. "Postcolonial Ekphrasis: Salman Rushdie Gives the Fing
Contemporary Literature 38.2 (1997): 232-59.
Lukàcs, Georg. The Historical Novel. 1937. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitch
1983.
Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London: Roudedge, 1978.
Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney. Using the Master's Tools: Resistance and the Literature of the African and
South-Asian Diasporas. New York: St. Martin's, 2000.
Parameswaran, Uma. "Handcuffed to History: Salman Rushdie's Art." ARIEL: A Review of International
English Literature 15.1 (1984): 34-45.
Pelizzari, Maria Antonella, ed. Traces of India: Photography, Architecture and the Politics of Representation,
1850-1900. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2003.
Pinney, Christopher. "Some Indian 'Views of India: The Ethics of Representation." Traces of India:
Photography, Architecture and the Politics of Representation, 1850-1900. Ed. Maria Antonella Pelizzari.
New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2003. 262-75.
Price, David W. "Salman Rushdie's 'Use and Abuse of History' in Midnight's Children." ARIEL: A Review of
International English Literature 25.2 (1994): 91-107.
Rahv, Philip. "The Literary Class War." Essays on Literature and Politics, 1932-1972. Eds. Arabel J. Porter
and Andrew J. Dvosin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978. 271-73.
Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. London: Roudedge, 1993.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta, 1991.
Slemon, Stephen. "Magic Realism and Postcolonial Discourse." Magical Realis
Community. Eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham,
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Dell, 1978.
Trussler, Michael. "Literary Artifacts: Ekphrasis in the Short Fiction of Do

and John Edgar Wideman." Contemporary Literature 41.2 (2000): 252-90
Zamora, Lois Parkinson and Wendy B. Faris, eds. "Introduction: Daiquiri Bi

Parrot(ie)s." Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham, N
EDWARD BARNABY is Assistant Dean of Yale University's Graduate Sc

and Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Yale College. His scholarship
relationship between visual culture, representations of history, and soc
drama, and film.

University of Manitoba Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

University of Manitoba Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Airbrushed History: Photography, Realism, and Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"

Author(s): EDWARD BARNABY

Mosaic 38/1 0027- 1276-05/00 10 16$02.00©Mosaic

This technique of "replay" aligns with various theorizations of realism by critics

Those generic blinders

because a child usually sees himself center-stage" (Parameswaran 40). Furthermore,

exhibition. Lifafas inclusion of a publicity photograph of "Carmen Verandah" points

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Dell, 1978.

Trussler, Michael. "Literary Artifacts: Ekphrasis in the Short Fiction of Do

Zamora, Lois Parkinson and Wendy B. Faris, eds. "Introduction: Daiquiri Bi

EDWARD BARNABY is Assistant Dean of Yale University's Graduate Sc

You might also like