Show and Tell

This essay revisits an article of mine which discussed the ekphrastic description of The Boyhood of Raleigh, an 1870 painting by Sir John Everett Millais, in Salman Rushdie's 1981 novel Midnight's Children. The narrator of Midnight's Children, Saleem Sinai, had a print of Millais's painting on his bedroom wall as a child in post-independence Bombay, and he begins his account of that childhood with a description of the painting. In my article and in the revised version published as a chapter in my book on Rushdie's novel, ¹ I discussed the ekphrasis, the verbal representation of a visual image, in terms of colonial mimicry and considered Millais's painting as an imperial text to which Rushdie's novel was the postcolonial riposte. Empire and colony, history, and art are indeed at issue in the ekphrasis, but what was missing from my discussion was the significance of the contest between the different media of painting and narrative fiction. This article supplements my earlier pieces by considering the significance of that contest.