Representation of the Subaltern in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) remains one of the most significant postcolonial novels to interrogate the nation’s fractured past and the politics of representation. Central to the narrative is the tension between dominant historical discourses and the silenced voices that lie beneath them—the subaltern. This paper examines how Midnight’s Children represents the subaltern within the political, social, and cultural landscape of postcolonial India. Drawing on theories by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ranajit Guha, and Subaltern Studies scholars, the analysis explores how Rushdie highlights linguistic marginality, class inequality, cultural hybridity, and the erasure of minority histories. The novel’s narrative method—fragmentation, magical realism, and metafiction—works as a counter-narrative to the dominant historiography of the nation-state. Through characters such as Saleem Sinai, Shiva, Parvati-the-Witch, and the countless unnamed masses, Rushdie dramatizes the struggles of marginalised communities whose stories remain excluded from official history. Ultimately, the novel becomes a literary site where subaltern voices are excavated, though not always successfully, raising larger questions about whether the subaltern can truly speak.