Finding the Self in the Otherness of Nature: The Sundarbans and Postcolonial Identity in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Abstract

Although there is an ongoing dichotomy between nature and culture, works of literature often make use of nature to depict certain aspects of the human condition and reveal what is hidden in the subconscious of the characters. It may be deemed inevitable because humankind is also part of nature. One of these aspects occurs during intense situations like wartime. War, as a state of chaos and instability, offers soldiers a kind of obscurity at times when they find themselves in a constrained experience. Nature, at these moments, plays a crucial role by offering the characters a point of serenity in which they can recover from their trauma and reconstruct their self. This environment may sometimes be a jungle or a desert. This article aims to do an ecocritical reading of “the Sundarbans” chapter of Midnight's Children focusing on Saleem Sınai's search for his identity and finding it in one of the most beautiful and also perilous forests in the world. Saleem's quest as a soldier in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 to find who he really is takes him to one of the politically most disputed regions on the border of Bangladesh and India in South Asia. In this respect, the ambiguity of the Sundarbans is a metaphor for the ambiguity of the postcolonial identity. Ecocriticism, which mainly deals with the physical space, is usually approached with doubt by the postcolonial critics who center on the promotion of individual identity. By emphasizing Saleem's experiences in nature in the unique environment of the Sundarbans, this article also aims to reconcile the controversy arising from the diverse aspirations of both ecocriticism and postcolonialism over their research foci.

Keywords

• Ecocriticism
• Postcolonialism
• Identity
• Bioregionalism
• Nature