ABSTRACT
This chapter will use the insights gained from an analysis of motherland as metaphor and transfer them to one of the most famous works of the South Asian diaspora, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). As the author variously remarks in his writing, this novel was written in an attempt to recapture his version of India and to draw up a narrative of his multi-rooted diasporic belonging. Therefore, the chapter attempts to establish how the novel critically draws on nationalist as well as prominent Western discourses, to map its narrative onto the allegorical outline of Mother India by means of what is termed a ‘de-condensating’ structure. This term derives from Derrida, whose theoretical vocabularies, together with Judith Butler’s, are here employed to explore narrative performances of mothering which construct a different genealogy of diasporic writing, both claiming and disclaiming the familiar tradition through translational practices. In the process, the figure of mother is transformed from a trope of national ontology into one of diasporic relationality.
