Brown Nose-ing: Physiognomy as personal and political history in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Craft of Making People Out of Bits and Pieces: "we are not unitary selves, we are a kind of bag of selves, which we draw out from . . . "
Salman Rushdie famously said that character is never unitary. To be precise, he said in an interview that ‘I have this notion we’re not just born as human beings, but that we actually have to learn how to become human beings, and many . . . characters . . . are for a long time not really unitary selves, they’re just collections of selves. They’re kind of masks, they put on this or that role, and they can change very dramatically, And I think that’s also true about people, that we are not unitary selves, we are a kind of bag of selves, which we draw out from; we become this or that self in different circumstances.”
It is, of course, a standard thing for novelists to use physical qualities and characteristics of characters to symbolize or comment on character, personality, intentions, and affects. Thus, we often hear about how eyes, faces, smiles, body language and movement signify deeper underlying qualities and tendencies. In postcolonial magical realism, this technique is often taken to a whole other level and dimension, however, because in this genre of literature, things that appear to be perfectly ordinary have magical, transformative or anti-realist qualities and functions.
Those magical metamorphoses more often than not also function beyond quirks or novelties as core attributes or roadmaps to the journey the writer wants us to take. Let’s look, for an example, at Salman Rushdie’s epochal 1981 novel Midnight’s Children to draw attention to an excellent example of such description of the human body, or its appendages. Let us also consider Rushdie’s work in Midnight’s Children to be a powerful gesture toward the collective, ancestral, or familial through the individual and the unique.
The organ or appendage at issue in Rushdie’s novel, within the very first pages, is the protagonist Saleem’s nose. On the first page of the novel, the first-person narrator Saleem refers to himself as hailed by monikers such as “Snotnose” and “Sniffer,” at a time when he couldn’t “even wipe my own nose” (7). This nose, moreover, is also a bequest, a legacy from his grandfather Aadam Aziz who “hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray” (8), on a morning in 1915. This is a Kashmiri family that owns a traditional and typical gemstone business (11), moreover (though Aadam Aziz departed from family tradition to train in Europe as a medical doctor), and Aziz’s “three drops of blood [that] plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly . . . and . . . transformed into rubies . . .” while “the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified too. . . as . . . diamonds (8).
This is only the beginning of a chain of descriptions related to the family nose that serves to fix an individual who seems inclined to escape history as well as heredity, and beyond that, the country. This includes both grandfather Aadam and grandson Saleem, and their split and divided personalities are dwelt upon. History is not forgetful if people are, and it doesn’t let go as easily as people might want. Instead, it leads those it singles out literally by the nose.
The grandfather Aadam could not permanently stay in Heidelberg, Germany as a medical trainee though he wished to disavow his family traditions (including even his Islamic faith), feeling “as though the old place [of his birth, Kashmir] resented his educated, stethescoped return” (9). His grandson Saleem is one of the “Midnight’s children” who are, mythically, born at the stroke of India’s independence from Britain in 1947 and whose fatal misfortune is to share their country’s affliction of being traumatized at birth as a nation instantly chopped into two pieces: India and Pakistan.
“But the central feature of my grandfather’s Anatomy,” Saleem says a little later, “was neither colour nor height, neither strength of arm nor straightness of back. There it was reflected in the water, undulating like a mad plantain in the centre of his face . . . his rippling nose . . . it is what one sees first and remembers longest. ‘A cyranose,’ Ilse Lubin (a fellow German medical student) said, and Oskar added, ‘A Proboscissimus.’ Ingrid (friend and ex-lover) announced, ‘You could cross a river on that nose’” (12). Not long in coming will be predictable comparisons of this nose to another appendage of the male anatomy.
Next we read that “Doctor Aziz’s nose—comparable only to the trunk of the elephant-headed [Hindu God] Ganesh—established incontrovertibly his right to be a patriarch” (13). The travel from olfactory to generative organs and functions is already under way. But it’s a socially ostracized old Kashmiri man who ferries boats across the Dal lake for a living who began training Aziz when he was a boy in the glorious lore of the proboscis: “When young Aadam was barely past puberty the dilapidated boatman said, ‘That’s a nose to start a family on, my princeling. There’d be no mistaking whose brood they were. Mughal Emperors would have given their right hand for noses like that one’” (13).
The love of India’s Mughal emperors for the paradise-like valley of Kashmir is matter of lore, but the old boatman Tai functions in the story as the interpreter, the bard of the nose, as well as a Charon-like figure, and as “a watery Caliban.” Indeed, Tai gives this away plainly to the reader when he tells Aadam “Smile, smile, it is your history I am keeping in my head” (16). In other words, Tai serves as chronicler of myth as well as a creature of myth himself. This, moreover, is a function that will be inherited eventually by the narrator of the novel, Saleem, who himself will carry on the story of Salman Rushdie, the Indo-Pak-Brit writer with the also imposing nose who himself happened to be born on August 15th, 1947.
Tai also calls Aadam “Nakoo, the nosey one” (16), and continues making scandalous comparisons between nose and penis—“‘look . . . that big cucumber in your face is waggling like the little one in your pajamas!’” (17). Saleem continues: “also from Tai, my grandfather heard about noses . . . . Tai tapped his left nostril. ‘You know what this is, nakkoo? It’s the place where the outside world meets the world inside you . . . . a nose like this, little idiot, is a great gift. I say: trust it. When it warns you, look out or you’ll be finished. Follow your nose and you’ll go far” (18).
The nose has thus progressed from olfactory and generative organ to a moral and worldly rule-giver, guide, and signifying system once again tied to the family past, political past, and pre-colonial Islamic past of India and Kashmiris, whom history split between Indian and Pakistan.
This novel is also a tale of a rebuff to colonial self-congratulation about the “white man’s burden.” When Tai meets Aadam Aziz as a grown man and doctor trained in western medicine, his ire is instant and unquenchable: “A fine business. A wet-head nakkoo child goes away before he’s learned one damn thing and he comes back a big doctor sahib with a big bag full of foreign machines, and he’s still as silly as an owl. Big shot . . . . big bag, big shot. Pah! We haven’t got enough bags at home that you must bring back that thing made of a pig’s skin that makes one unclean just by looking at it? And inside, God knows what all” (20-21). This invective full of sexual innuendo is directed against Aziz’ medical attache or briefcase with western instruments of examination and healing, setting the ancient ferryman off on a rant against this leather bag made of pig skin which is unholy and dirty for Muslims as well as, of course, a placeholder for a condom. Tai raves on: “The Heidelberg bag quakes under a torrent of abuse. ‘Sister-sleeping pigskin bag from Abroad full of foreigners’ tricks. Big-shot bag. Now if a man breaks an arm that bag will not let the bone-setter bind it in leaves. Now a man must let his wife lie beside that and watch knives come and cut her open . . . . That bag should fry in hell with the testicles of the ungodly” (21).
A lot is roiling together in Rushdie’s novel, and the disquisition upon the nose with which it begins at once directs us to its heart and underbelly: colonial history; postcolonial malaise; a disenchanted decolonization; the continuing Hindu versus Muslim violence bequeathed by the British to India as a final Trojan horse of ‘Divide and Conquer’; Oedipal and filial drama closely mimicking India’s postcolonial political history; and a sense of being betrayed by the myth of western progress. In his single riff on the nose, then extended into the medical bag that replaces the wisdom of the Mughal Emperor’s nose with valueless western medical knowledge (in Tai’s opinion), Rushdie sweeps the reader up and away into this world of magical realism where politics and history manifest themselves not in the language of textbooks or even polemic, but in that of magical realism through perfectly ordinary anatomical objects.