MIXING CULTURAL IDENTITIES IN SALMAN RUSDIE’S MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN: A POSTCOLONIAL STUDY

Abstract

Midnight’s Children is one of Rushdie’s popular novels. This research is conducted to show the blend of old and new India’s culture through the characters of midnight children in Midnight’s Children and how this novel shows India’s hybridity to estrange and subvert colonial power. In this novel, the characters of midnight’s children live between two or more cultural identities without applying a clearly particular identity. There is a mixing of identities as an effort to estrange and disavow colonial authority. Therefore, I use Bhabha’s theory about hybridity. In this research, I use qualitative method to evoke the moment of hybridity, hybrid’s character and the space “in-between” as the consequence of hybridity through selected events and characterizations in Midnight’s Children. Hybridity in this research is not simply discussed about cultural mixing between the colonized and colonizer. However, it is a strategy appeared by Bhabha to solve postcolonial issue in the third world. Homi Bhabha’s hybridity occurs as the ambiguity of identity that brings a person in a position of “in-between”, to be Indian and to be British, even Pakistanis. This research also evokes the concept of in-between to remake India’s history. History is the fact and the fiction. The characters in this novel have successfully made their own destiny and narration that destabilizes the factual history by making his own India’s history that is not clear whether it is fact or fiction. As the result, they are able to play India’s history by demolishing British’s power that although his characters’ identities are tied to their colonial histories, they can change the domination of British.