1957 Indian General Election in Bombay

The 1957 Indian general election in Bombay marks a split between electoral victory and political security: the All-India Congress wins, yet opposition forces gain ground, and intimidation shadows the vote. In Saleem’s account, the election also becomes a point where public history and private memory refuse to line up neatly.

Results and Opposition

The All-India Congress is badly shocked despite winning the election. Twelve million votes make the Communists the largest single opposition party. In Bombay, many electors reject the Congress emblem of a sacred cow and suckling calf in favor of the less emotionally charged symbols of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti and Maha Gujarat Parishad. Saleem’s account presents the result not as a simple transfer of power, but as evidence that Congress dominance faces organized opposition on more than one political front.

The prospect of the Communists’ strength is discussed on the family’s hillock, while Saleem’s mother continues to blush. The family resigns itself to the partition of the state of Bombay. The personal and political details sit beside one another without being resolved: the conversation registers the election’s stakes, while the mother’s continuing blush and the family’s resignation give the political outcome an intimate, uneasy texture.

Shiva and the Polling Station

A member of the Midnight Children’s Conference participates in the election through a role far removed from ordinary campaigning. Shiva, believed to be the son of Wee Willie Winkie, is recruited by a party Saleem refuses to name, though he hints that it is the one with the largest funds. On polling day, Shiva and his gang, the Cowboys, wait outside a polling station in the north of the city.

The Cowboys’ presence makes the election’s appeal to voter judgment sit uneasily beside coercion. Some carry stout sticks, others juggle stones, and still others pick their teeth with knives as they urge voters to use their ballots wisely. Saleem leaves open whether ballot-box seals were broken or ballot-stuffing took place; he does not claim to know. What he does report is that Qasim the Red narrowly loses his seat, to the satisfaction of Shiva’s paymasters. The gang’s conspicuous menace and the narrator’s uncertainty about what happened inside the polling process leave the result shadowed by suspicion rather than proven fraud.

Memory and Retrospective Uncertainty

The election’s date becomes a problem when Padma asks Saleem when it took place. He answers without thinking that it was sometime in the spring, then realizes that the 1957 election occurred before, not after, his tenth birthday. He cannot make his memory accept the corrected sequence, despite racking his brains, and admits that he does not know what has gone wrong.

Padma tries to console him by observing that everyone forgets small things. Saleem immediately expands the concern: if small things disappear, he wonders whether larger ones may follow. The uncertainty over chronology does not erase the political particulars he has just narrated, but it unsettles the authority with which he can arrange them. The election thus appears twice over: as a contest marked by opposition and intimidation, and as a remembered event whose place in the narrator’s own life will not stay fixed.