From Colonial to Postcolonial Trauma: Rushdie, Forster and the Problem of Indian Communalism in Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh

Abstract

‘O my friends, there is no friend’, intones Jacques Derrida via Montaigne and Aristotle in The Politics of Friendship (2005). ‘Someone sighs; a wise man, perhaps, has uttered his last breath. Perhaps. Perhaps he is talking to his sons or his brothers gathered together momentarily around a deathbed: “Oh my friends, there is no friend”.’¹ The three novels that concern us in this chapter, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) constitute attempts to come to terms with otherness in politically torn nations by forging personal connections which can challenge boundaries of race, faith, education, as well as prescribed notions of national identity. This impossibility of friendship in politically subjugated or torn postcolonial nations creates a mood of intimate violence that scars the individual and also mirrors national histories. I propose that Rushdie finds in Forster’s textual relinquishing of friendship during the Raj a preliminary model to inform his own debates on individual and collective trauma in colonial and postcolonial India.