The question of meaning has driven the history and development of the human race. The quest for purpose has time and again led humans to search out individual significance through various types of communities. It is this that inspired prophets to unite warring desert tribes into broader religious communities. In more recent centuries individuals have sought meaning in more particularist ways, creating devolutionary nationalisms and regionalisms. The communal form that dominated intellectual discourse of the 19th and 20th centuries was the nation. Now, at the dawn of the 21st century the centrality of the nation in social and political discussions is in question. Whether or not the nation will survive this challenge can only be determined by time. What may lay beyond the nation is only now becoming imaginable. In recent decades intellectuals and artists have begun to grapple with the very notion of the nation. Central to any discussion on this topic is the author Salman Rushdie who, in his modern epic novel, Midnight's Children, considers the problems of identity in the modern world, using India as his model to test nationalist theory, pushing it to the breaking-point and beyond.
In the essay, "The Riddle of Midnight: India, August 1987," Rushdie attacks the very foundations of nationalist theory, forcing the imagined world of European nationalists to pass the test of reality. He poses the question, "does India exist?" Not only does he challenge one to consider whether or not India is a distinct nation from Pakistan and Bangladesh, but if India is a nation at all. He writes of his encounters with Indians who, like him, were born in 1947, the year of India's independence. When asked if India exists, many of them started out by reassuring themselves of it's existence. After all, if the second largest nation in the world isn't, what is? Once thoroughly reassured of India's existence, many then turned toward dismantling it through what Rushdie calls communalistic politics, emphasizing membership in a religious community over a common Indian identity. Others rejected communalism and nationalism, denying the significance of any communities in the name of pragmatism. Rushdie describes an India that is neither blind to the individuals need for a community of meaning, nor torn along warring communalistic lines: "My India has always been based on ideas of multiplicity, pluralism, hybridity: ideas to which the ideologies of the communalists are diametrically opposed. To my mind the defining image of India is the crowd, a crowd is by its very nature superabundant, heterogeneous, many things at once." According to the crowd version of reality favored by Rushdie, India is neither a monolith of pragmatism nor a jig-saw puzzle of communalistic divisions and tensions, but a mass of distinct individuals belonging to multiple over-lapping communities and a spectrum of characters of many faiths, tongues and ancestries.
Is such a crowd a nation? Relying upon traditional European definitions of the nation as a unit of linguistic, cultural, religious, racial and historical groupings does little clarify whether or not India is a nation. Traditional notions of the nation fail to account for the fact that human geography is not naturally ordered along these lines. India, with it's thousands of languages, many faiths, regionalisms and ethnicities is a prime example of the break-down of traditional concepts of the nation. According to such definitions national groupings that could be formed from this crowd would include the entire Subcontinent, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan-Bangladesh, India, Khalistan, Northern India, Southern India, or Kashmir. The 19th century Austrian political thinker, Otto Bauer recognized that not all nations are defined by a common language, racial stock, culture or even history. He defines the nation by its distinctive "national character." Ultimately this fails to make the global national map any simpler, failing to provide a set of criteria for determining the nationality of any given individual, assuming it to be an obvious fact. He rhetorically asks the very question that tears his theory apart: "does the Englishman who lives in Berlin and speaks German thereby become a German?" The implied answer is no, and yet no explanation is given for this assumption. Thus, even the more critical of 19th century European nationalist intellectuals fail to delineate the basic contours of the nation.
Later political thinkers, such as the Jewish Hungarian immigrant to England, Eric Hobsbawm, are able to recognize the artificiality of the nation. According to Hobsbawm, "nationalism is a political programme, and in historic terms a fairly recent one." For him the nation is a construct made to justify the state and control the population through homogenization. While he affirms that earlier revolutionary nationalisms served a positive role in the development of human civilization through the expansion of human communities, he deems more recent, devolutionary nationalisms to be detrimental to the progress of humankind. With contemporary nationalism now rendered unecssary, artificial, and even detrimental to progress, Hobsbawm reveals what it is that has been repeatedly confused with the nation: ethnicity, which is defined as the existing characteristics that identify the individual as the member of a group. Additionally, he considers ethnicity to be a possible substitute community of meaning for the nation, "filling the empty containers of nationalism."
Hobsbawm elaborates upon the meaning aspect of ethnicity for the 21st century: "...belonging together, preferably in groupings with visible badges of membership and recognition signs, is more important than ever in societies in which everything combines to destroy what binds human beings together into communities." He considers ethnicity, along with families, subcultures, professional communities, and the social groupings of inernational youth culture, to be one of the many possible meaning communities available to the 21st century individual. An ethnic identity of this sort is an entirely natural and potentially progressive form of community.
It is in this sense that Rushdie is Indian. However, Rushdie's ethnic identity is unusually complex. In addition to being Indian, he is also a Bombayite, a Muslim, a Kashmiri, and an Englishman. In this way his very existence forces one to consider the possibility of one individual belonging to multiple ethnic groups. In an era of increasing human migration and intermarriage, clear-cut ethnic divisions will become a thing of the past, if they ever existed. Rather than viewing this as a loss to cultural diversity, one may view this development as a widening of cultural combinations and individual diversity. This pluralistic vision of the crowd not only accounts for differences between individuals, but within them as well. Midnight's Children is a story about such split persons with partitioned souls.
Though the novel's protagonist, Saleem Sinai, often expresses sympathy for the universalist left represented by the Communist Party of India, he shows himself to be a supporter of a political program of different, more homegrown origins. This program, represented by Mian Abdullah and later by Picture Singh, is one that is neither blind to the existence of ethnicity nor plagued by devolutionary particularist factionalism. Saleem Sinai describes this populist left: "Picture Singh spoke of socialism which owed nothing to foreign influences. 'Listen, captains,' he told warring ventriloquists and puppeteers, 'will you go to your villages and talk about Stalin's and Mao's? Will Bihari or Tamil peasants care about the killing of Trotsky?' The chayaof his magical umbrella cooled the most intemperate of wizards; and had the effect on me, of convincing me that one day soon the snake charmer would follow in the footsteps of Mian Abdullah so many years ago; that, like the legendary Hummingbird, he would leave the ghetto to shape the future by the sheer force of his will..." (MNC, 508)
This message was present in history as the major opposition to the Jana Singh Hindu sactarian party. The historical Mian Abdullah, a Kashmiri peasant, led the Nehru-aligned Kashmiri Muslims, seeking cultural autonomy for Kashmir and for Muslims within a broad, Dubcontinent-wide Indian nation, and promising much-needed land reform for the rural poor of Kashmir. Many other Subcontinental Muslims pursued similar paths in opposition to the separatist Muslim League under the leadership of Ali Jinnah. Abdullah was not afraid of ethnicity, nor did he use it in divisive ways. He understood that it was possible to be many things at once, and that his identity was simultaneously Kashmiri, Islamic, and Indian.
Such split persons and multiculturalism are more than simply the liberal ideals of diversity and equality, but rather actual sources of the creative tension that drives the progress of human society. Rushdie writes of such benefits in his essay, "Imaginary Homelands." Referring to fellow émigrés he writes, "Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy. If literature is in part the business of finding new angles at which to enter reality, then once again our distance, our long geographical perspective, may provide us with such angles." Rushdie is not the first to observe the advantages possessing multiple ethnic identifications. From earlier situations of cultural pluralism the same advantages can be noted. Many of the richest cultural achievements of history were sparked within the intellectual incubator provided by such culturally pluralistic scenarios.
For example, the Jewish diaspora provided the creative tension which resulted in disproportionate Jewish participation in European, American and Middle Eastern intellectual discourse, including such figures as Albert Einstein, Maimonides, Franz Kafka, Leon Trotsky, Karl Marx, Moses Mendelsohn, Baruch Spinoza, Noam Chomsky, and Emma Goldman in addition to many lesser political and mass culture figures. For this reason many Jews such as Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin and Robin Cohen have come to favor exile over groundedness, citing creative tension as a significant reason. Cohen claims that the most important fact that the Jewish experience illustrates for the rest of the world is that "peoples and homelands are not necessarily and organically linked."
Another example of the benefits to be gained by cultural pluralism can be found in the 12th century Cordoban Muslim, Ibn Rushd. Living in multicultural medieval Spain, Ibn Rushd became one of the leading Islamic voices for women’s rights and rationalist skepticism. Known in the West as Averroes, he is credited with translating many key texts from ancient Greek into Latin via Arabic, and thereby providing much of the material necessary for the European Renaissance. Additionally, he advocated the pursuit of scientific and artistic advancement, claiming that this did not contradict the demands of religious faith, allowing many Christians to adapt his argument to justify their own activities in these fields. It seems to be a pleasant irony that Rushdie, who is so fond of using names to signify connections, is the heir to a name so similar to that of Ibn Rushd, for they share more than similar names, but they share the fact that each of them drew intellectual inspiration from culturally pluralistic lives.
Midnight’s Children is a story that can be read as a manifesto of multiculturalism. Many questions remain unanswered in the novel. Even with the help of Rushdie’s essays it is unclear precisely how a non-national ethnic identity functions. The Yiddish playwright and author, S. Ansky, was a strong advocate for the benefits of diaspora. In his short story, "The Tower in Rome," he writes of the Jewish diaspora as an unusual opportunity to weaken and subvert empires, to challenge homogeneity. He writes of the Jewish community as bundles of grass that stay green so long as they stay in bundles. He warns that should they separate they would wither and brown, and that the Jewish community would lose its ability to challenge the status quo of empire and homogeneity. The Persian poet, Rumi, offers a very different notion of individual identity in his poem, "Only Breath," in which he writes, "Not Christian or Jew, not Hindu, Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next, did not descend from Adam and Eve or any origin story. My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body nor soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds and that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being." Somewhere between the diasporic community-oriented ideal of Ansky and the entirely distinct individual described in Rumi's poem, "Only Breath," lies Rushdie’s vision of ethnic identity for the 21st century.
