"...our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind." -Salman RushdieRushdie uses his characters to help develop these imaginary homelands. In turn they represent different aspects of India and the overarching ideas of the time. Saleem's memory and subsequent loss of it during the Indo-Pakistani war (where Bangladesh declares independence from Pakistan) is an example of the confusion of the social memory at that time. An example of this representation of Saleem as the memory of India, or that he represents India is the geography lesson where Zagallo says to the class about Saleem, "In the face of these ugly ape you don't see the whole map of India?"(231) They use his nose to represent the Deccan peninsula; the `stains' represent Pakistan, "a stain of the face of India" (232). So Saleem's face represents the lands over which the wars are fought throughout the book. "In any war, the field of battle suffers worse devastation than either army. This is natural" (43), says Aziz in the beginning of the book, foreshadowing the suffering of his own grandson.Saleem seems to understand his own ostracism from his family even before he becomes aware that he is literally not of their blood. He resists falling into the same cracks as his grandfather early in the narration:Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout laws of halal. (59)One of the most memorable quotes of the novel:...maybe there is something unnatural about me, some fundamental lack of emotional response; but my thoughts have always aspired to higher things. Hence my resilience. Hit me: I bounce back (But no resistance is of any use against the cracks.) (396-397)Here he is resisting his family's ways, and the ways of his family's culture with the reference to his grandfather's admission of religion. Saleem addresses the cracks again at the end of the novel after his grandfather has died. He gives himself a piece of advice about his grandfather's ways on page 187 when he quotes "What can't be cured must be endured." He is referring to the first page of the novel, when he introduces his grandfather:...he resolved never again to kiss any earth for any god or man. This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history. (10)Aziz becomes the splitting India figuratively. Aziz's education comes from Tai, early in the Novel, "From Tai, Aadam learned the secrets of the lake" (17). The lake represents older more violent ways, as Tai is known for his murder and drowning of European women who come to ride in his boat. Tai's resistance is more of a rebellion to Colonialism, if violent at that. Aziz absorbs these older traditions but maintains a newer generational understanding of his culture that he discusses in his marriage to Naseem. Before he marries her he comes to a symbolic realization about her (and consequently India):So gradually Doctor Aziz came to have a picture of Naseem in his mind, a badly fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts. This phantasm of a partitioned woman began to haunt him, and not only in his dreams. Glued together by his imagination she accompanied him on all his rounds, she moved into the front room of his mind, so that waking and sleeping he could feel in his fingertips the softness of her ticklish skin or the perfect tiny wrists or the beauty of her ankles; he could smell her scent of lavender and chambeli; he could hear her voice and her helpless laughter of a little girl; but she was headless, because he had never seen her face. (25)When Aziz marries her, he finds that the sex is disappointing. He says to her, "Forget about being a good Kashmiri girl. Start thinking about being a modern Indian woman" (34). He resists from saying for her to be a modern `British' woman, even though India has not become independent yet, but refers to their own culture. Instead of taking his advice, Naseem does her own resisting that is seen in the rest of their marriage as a result.Naseem is called assiduous throughout the novel (especially on 67), a word that means, "Constant in application or effort; working diligently at a task; persevering; industrious; attentive: an assiduous student." She resists the sexual education of her marriage for tradition, and claims power from it: It is a sign of power of this custom that even when her husband was afflicted by constipation, she never once permitted him to choose his food, and listened to no requests or words of advice. A fortress may not move. Not even when its dependants' movements become irregular. (41)The battle between Aziz's modernisms and Naseem's traditional ways culminates in a starvation war. Aziz sends about the children's religious instructor and Naseem refuses to cook for him anymore in rebellion. Aziz stubbornly refuses to eat anything else and wastes away. When Aziz becomes deathly thin, Alia and Naseem devise a plan and Naseem pretends to fall ill. Alia feeds both of them until everything is better and they have both reclaimed their pride. This domestic version of the impact of modern colonialism, the resistance and the reclamation mirrors exactly what was going on in many families and India at the time. It is hard to encapsulate the entire reality, as Rushdie has Saleem suddenly admit, "Is this an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole reality? Worse: am I infected, too?" (75). Saleem revisits his grandfather who has just found religion at age sixty-eight and finds Aziz:I saw the cracks in his eyes - a delicate tracery of colourless lines against the blue; I saw a network of fissures spreading beneath his leathery skin. (275)(Saleem recognizes these cracks as death.) Aziz tells his family of his religious experience meeting God,...although the details of the particular deity he had seen grew blurred in his mind, leaving behind only a passionate, drooling desire for revenge (which is also common to us both)...he would refuse to go to Pakistan (as Reverend Mother planned). (276-277)Aziz dies on Christmas Day, 1963. The allusions to muscular Christianity and Colonialism are not lost. Even when presented with this force in his old age, Aziz responds with resistance. Aziz has always represented the secular generation in the novel. When he gets rid of the religious tutor in the beginning of the novel he says to his wife, "He was teaching them to hate, wife. He tells them to hate Hindus and Buddhists and Jains and Sikhs..." (42-43). Rushdie himself admits that he is secular:I am a member of that generation of Indians who were sold the secular ideal. One of the things I liked, and still like, about India is that is based on a non-sectarian philosophy. I was not raised in a narrowly Muslim environment; I do not consider Hindu culture to be either alien from me or more important than the Islamic heritage. I believe this has something to do with the nature of Bombay, a metropolis in which the multiplicity of commingled faiths and cultures curiously creates a remarkably secular ambience. Saleem Sinai makes use, eclectically, of whatever elements from whatever sources he chooses. It may have been easier for his author to do this from outside modern India than inside it. (431)Even with the resistance of his own religion, Aziz succumbs to reclaim one before he dies. His openness to all religions shows that the idea of secularism transcends the nation of India, and Pakistan and Bangladesh and aspires to familiarize itself to the world. The religious, secular and resistant characters are Rushdie's way to signal that his characters transcend narrowly defined cultures.All of the characters in the novel, while transcending narrowly defined cultures are trying to come to and understanding about colonialism, resistance and reclamation. Rushdie's perception of the `big picture symbolism' (which he reveals through his characters) is coming to an understanding about something from experience, and by doing so, coming to a consciousness of both personal and collective identity. Rushdie was able to see "the big picture" from his deracination from India as he writes the novel in England. The secular character in the novel, Saleem's grandfather Aadam Aziz, introduces this generation of secular thinkers. This school of thought then existed before the Independence of India, and the birth of Saleem. Secularism is one example of an idea that transcends the nation of India, and Pakistan and Bangladesh. This seems to be Rushdie's overarching objective: to leave us all with an understanding about something, and by doing so coming to a consciousness of both personal and collective identity. We must remember the events the characters and the history of this story for:"It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, That its loss is part of our common humanity." -Salman Rushdie