In reading Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Reverend Mother holds a seminal point of gravity in the patchwork of characters for his fictional tale. Naseem Aziz not only imbues the culture, gender, sex, nation and history of India, but as wife to Aadam, also becomes the symbolic mother of India.
Reverend Mother, like Christian patron saints, holy Hindu gods and sacred Muslim shrines, is exalted above the masses through deeds and words; she lives in “an invisible fortress of her own making, an ironclad citadel of traditions and certainties” (p. 40), where few souls dare challenge her bearing; her name alone commands profound respect; authority and power over her dominion: home, children and by extension, nation.
Her five children, Alia, Mumtaz, Hanif, Mustapha and Emerald are Reverend Mother’s dowry to India; and through fits and starts, the children add their individual footprints to the historical narratives.
Reverend Mother nourishes India according to customs and traditions; and what meals she doles out are exclusively within her domain of power; and when errant children or husband offend her, she can withdraw life-sustaining provisions until the matter is resolved to her satisfaction.
In the novel, readers come to know Reverend Mother through her willful acts of defiance, delusional self-righteousness and petulant self-denial; but in the end, readers also see a Naseem who remains faithful to her initial core; and her fidelity casts a light on her intermittent silence, almost as if to pay homage to periods of time when mere words betray through misstatements; when only “whatitsname” can convey the deepest breadth of her thoughts, the “fortress” of her mind.
For what are readers to make of Reverent Mother’s extemporaneous use of “whatsitsname” with every sentence, as an adjective, noun or verb? Could this “leitmotif,” as Saleem calls it, be much more than a musical recurring passage, but in fact the recurrent failure of words to express the fullness of truth she beholds? (p. 41). After all, Reverend Mother had the power to invade dreams (p. 58-59) and had often foretold future family woes (p. 312). Had she been able to define all the whats that are in a name, would anyone have believed her? Did they believe Saleem?
Rushdie, the expatriate writer flawlessly fits the “intelligentsia ‘intellectual’” constructed by Mira Yuval-Davis in Gender and Nation by “creat[ing] and reproduc[ing] nationalistic ideologies…of oppressed collectivities” (p. 2). Reverend Mother is Rushdie’s symbolic “border guard” who “identif[ies] people as members or non-members of [his] specific collectivity” (p. 23). Moreover, Rushdie “restore[s] the past to [himself]” (p.10) with the “vivid colors” of Reverend Mother’s personality and allegiance to her truth.
Yes, rather than acquiesce, Reverend Mother chooses the sword of silence to “remain immured” against her perceived family follies. By her silence, she speaks her unimpeded truth as keeper of the faith. And yet even when speaking, her razor-sharp tongue also communicates her integrity, such as when the actress wife of her son, Hanif (pp. 277-278), who would later betray her husband, received her wrath; or when the ill-fated wedding of her daughter, Mumtaz, to Nadir Khan disintegrated in futility and she spoke after three years of silence; or when Ahmed refused to address his financial ruin and, Reverend Mother jumps into action and commands, “This is no time to hide in bed…Now he must be a man, whatsitsname, and do a man’s business” (p. 157).
Quite possibly Reverend Mother’s greatest gift to the story and by extension, India, is her relational “extension of kinship” (p. 1) to “undesirables” by way of Saleem. Nazeem, the matriarch, precedes her sex. And her act of kindness to Saleem precedes genealogy (p. 8). With one sublime clutch of the poor boy to her “bosom,” Reverend Mother “legitimized [Saleem]; there was no one to oppose her” (p. 324), even though Saleem did not have one drop of her blood, he had the blood of her nation, which he was rightfully claiming. .