Historiographic Metafiction: The New Historicist Approach to Saleem Sinai

Abstract

This article examines Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as a work of historiographic metafiction that constructs a counter?archive to both colonial and nationalist historiographies. Focusing on the narrative of Saleem Sinai, the study explores how New Historicism’s emphasis on the historicity of texts and the textuality of history intersects with postcolonial critiques of the archive. Methodologically, the article offers a qualitative, interpretive reading of Midnight’s Children, foregrounding episodes such as the Amritsar massacre, the Emergency, and the episodes involving the midnight children’s conference as sites where official records are questioned, supplemented, and subverted. The analysis argues that Rushdie’s use of magical realism and polyphonic narration exposes the silences and exclusions of colonial and nationalist archives while reimagining history from the standpoint of subaltern lives, affect, and embodiment. The article concludes that Saleem’s fragmented and unreliable narrative performs the labour of a counter?archive: it preserves marginal memories, foregrounds generational trauma, and insists on a plural, contested understanding of India’s past that resists closure and singular national narratives.