Orient Vs Occident: Reading Rushdie’s Novels as Contrapuntal Evidence

Abstract

Writers of various literary genre attempt to apply in their works their skills for the sake of carrying special meaning and end it with a capstone which could probably be of intensification. Thus the masterly account turns out to be a polished, intelligent, first-rate work for the reader, critic and reviewer. At this juncture, the climacteric part intensifies the reader’s conscious faculty to the extent of aggrandizement. In the works of Rushdie, one can trace this level of climax as the writer’s appositeness and pertinence which eventually emerge as the plot for some special intension. In his Midnight’s Children the reader is lifted to that space where the communities of two different territories-the East and the West or the so called by the academicians, the Orient and the Occident  who meet against each other for their stomping ground. Thus, the mere word identity began to undergo a lot of adjustments, development, modification, a shift or transition which in the long run has been practiced as identity crises, loss of identity etc. In this paper I would like to zero in on the tag mentioned above and thrust on the backdrop of Orient vs. Occident as the scrim for the advanced reading of the novel Midnight’s Children and other novels of Rushdie in which the same content is lurked. Since this paper deals with contrapuntal sequences of Rushdie’s works, the discussion revolves around both issues of the colonizer and the colonized, and addresses the views of imperialism.