Identity, Culture and Belonging in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Postcolonial English literature is profoundly engaged with the issues of identity, culture, and belonging in societies shaped by colonialism, displacement, and political transformation. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) stands as a seminal postcolonial novel that explores the complex relationship between personal identity and national history. Through the life of Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment of India’s independence, Rushdie presents identity as fragmented, hybrid, and historically contingent. This paper examines how Rushdie employs memory, magical realism, language, and political allegory to interrogate postcolonial identity and the crisis of belonging in post-independence India. It argues that Midnight’s Children challenges essentialist notions of identity and reveals belonging as unstable and continually reshaped by historical forces