Zeitgeist and the Literary Text: India, 1947, in Qurratulain Hyder’s My Temples, Too and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Rajan comments on Qurratulain Hyder's My Temples, Too (1948) and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) which share a date and place (places) central to their narratives: 15 August 1947, Independence Day in India (and Pakistan). Their convergence around this time-place is marked by a singular, defining spirit of the times. Comparing Hyder's first novel, My Temples, Too with Rushdie's early novel Midnight's Children permits people some access to the multiple ways in which literature, the novel specifically, represents and shapes history, not only as narrative, but also in terms of what they might call the zeitgeist. Although the literary products/expressions of this zeitgeist may vary--the two texts in question are chosen precisely for the more obvious differences of genre, period, language, and gender of their authors--a certain spirit of 1947 was pervasive, indeed inescapable, in the political as well as cultural consciousness of the time in the subcontinent.