''Midnight's Children'' is the second novel by Indian-British writer
Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie ( ; born 19 June 1947) is an Indian-born British and American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern wor ...
, published by
Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape is a British publishing firm headquartered in London and founded in 1921 by Herbert Jonathan Cape, who was head of the firm until his death.
Cape and his business partner Wren Howard (1893–1968) set up the publishing house in ...
with cover design by
Bill Botten, about India's transition from
British colonial rule to
independence
Independence is a condition of a nation, country, or state, in which residents and population, or some portion thereof, exercise self-government, and usually sovereignty, over its territory. The opposite of independence is the status of ...
and
partition. It is a
postcolonial
Postcolonialism (also post-colonial theory) is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic consequences of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and extractivism, exploitation of colonized pe ...
,
postmodern and
magical realist story told by its chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, set in the context of historical events. The style of preserving history with fictional accounts is
self-reflexive.
''Midnight's Children'' sold over one million copies in the UK alone and won the
Booker Prize and
James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981.
[Mullan, John.]
Salman Rushdie on the writing of Midnight's Children
" ''The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'', 26 July 2008. It was also awarded the special Booker of Bookers prize in 1993, and the
Best of the Booker in 2008, to celebrate the Booker Prize's 25th and 40th anniversaries.
In 2003 the novel appeared at number 100 on the
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
's
The Big Read poll which determined the UK's "best-loved novels" of all time.
Background and plot summary
''Midnight's Children'' is a loose allegory for events in 1947
British Raj India and after the
partition of India
The partition of India in 1947 was the division of British India into two independent dominion states, the Dominion of India, Union of India and Dominion of Pakistan. The Union of India is today the Republic of India, and the Dominion of Paki ...
. The protagonist and narrator of the story is
Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment when India became an independent country. The novel is divided into three books.
The first book begins with the story of the Sinai family, particularly with events leading up to the fall of
British Colonial India and the partition. Saleem is born precisely at midnight, 15 August 1947, therefore, exactly as old as independent India. He later discovers that all children born in India between 12 a.m. and 1 a.m. on that date are imbued with special powers. Saleem, using his telepathic powers, assembles a ''Midnight Children's Conference'', reflective of the issues India faced in its early statehood concerning the cultural, linguistic, religious, and political differences faced by a vastly diverse nation. Saleem acts as a telepathic conduit, bringing hundreds of geographically disparate children into contact while also attempting to discover the meaning of their gifts. In particular, those children born closest to the stroke of midnight wield more powerful gifts than the others. Shiva "of the Knees", Saleem's nemesis, and Parvati, called "Parvati-the-witch," are two of these children with notable gifts and roles in Saleem's story.
Meanwhile, Saleem's family begin a number of migrations and endure the numerous wars which plague the subcontinent. During this period he also suffers amnesia until he enters a quasi-mythological exile in the jungle of
Sundarban, where he is re-endowed with his memory. In doing so, he reconnects with his childhood friends. Saleem later becomes involved with the
Indira Gandhi
Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi (Given name, ''née'' Nehru; 19 November 1917 – 31 October 1984) was an Indian politician and stateswoman who served as the Prime Minister of India, prime minister of India from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 un ...
-proclaimed
Emergency
An emergency is an urgent, unexpected, and usually dangerous situation that poses an immediate risk to health, life, property, or environment and requires immediate action. Most emergencies require urgent intervention to prevent a worsening ...
and her son
Sanjay's "cleansing" of the Jama Masjid slum. For a time Saleem is held as a political prisoner; these passages contain scathing criticisms of Indira Gandhi's over-reach during the Emergency as well as a personal lust for power bordering on godhood. The Emergency signals the end of the potency of the Midnight Children, and there is little left for Saleem to do but pick up the few pieces of his life he may still find and write the chronicle that encompasses both his personal history and that of his still-young nation, a chronicle written for his son, who, like his father, is both chained and supernaturally endowed by history.
Major themes
The technique of
magical realism finds liberal expression throughout the novel and is crucial to constructing the parallel to the country's history.
The story moves in different parts of Indian Subcontinent – from
Kashmir
Kashmir ( or ) is the Northwestern Indian subcontinent, northernmost geographical region of the Indian subcontinent. Until the mid-19th century, the term ''Kashmir'' denoted only the Kashmir Valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir P ...
to
Agra
Agra ( ) is a city on the banks of the Yamuna river in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, about south-east of the national capital Delhi and 330 km west of the state capital Lucknow. With a population of roughly 1.6 million, Agra is the ...
and then to
Bombay
Mumbai ( ; ), also known as Bombay ( ; its official name until 1995), is the capital city of the Indian States and union territories of India, state of Maharashtra. Mumbai is the financial centre, financial capital and the list of cities i ...
,
Lahore
Lahore ( ; ; ) is the capital and largest city of the Administrative units of Pakistan, Pakistani province of Punjab, Pakistan, Punjab. It is the List of cities in Pakistan by population, second-largest city in Pakistan, after Karachi, and ...
and
Dhaka
Dhaka ( or ; , ), List of renamed places in Bangladesh, formerly known as Dacca, is the capital city, capital and list of cities and towns in Bangladesh, largest city of Bangladesh. It is one of the list of largest cities, largest and list o ...
. Nicholas Stewart in his essay, "Magic realism in relation to the post-colonial and Midnight's Children," argues that the "narrative framework of ''Midnight's Children'' consists of a tale – comprising his life story – which Saleem Sinai recounts orally to his wife-to-be Padma. This self-referential narrative (within a single paragraph Saleem refers to himself in the first person: 'And I, wishing upon myself the curse of Nadir Khan...;' and the third: '"I tell you," Saleem cried, "it is true. ..."') recalls indigenous Indian culture, particularly the similarly orally recounted ''
Arabian Nights''.
The events in the book also parallel the magical nature of the narratives recounted in ''Arabian Nights'' (consider the attempt to electrocute Saleem at the latrine (p. 353), or his journey in the 'basket of invisibility' (p. 383))."
He also notes that, "the narrative comprises and compresses Indian cultural history."
"'Once upon a time,' Saleem muses, 'there were
Radha
Radha (, ), also called Radhika, is a Hindu goddess and the chief consort of the god Krishna. She is the goddess of love, tenderness, compassion, and devotion. In scriptures, Radha is mentioned as the avatar of Lakshmi and also as the Prak� ...
and
Krishna
Krishna (; Sanskrit language, Sanskrit: कृष्ण, ) is a major deity in Hinduism. He is worshipped as the eighth avatar of Vishnu and also as the Supreme God (Hinduism), Supreme God in his own right. He is the god of protection, c ...
, and
Rama
Rama (; , , ) is a major deity in Hinduism. He is worshipped as the seventh and one of the most popular avatars of Vishnu. In Rama-centric Hindu traditions, he is considered the Supreme Being. Also considered as the ideal man (''maryāda' ...
and
Sita
Sita (; ), also known as Siya, Jānaki and Maithili, is a Hindu goddess and the female protagonist of the Hindu epic ''Ramayana''. Sita is the consort of Rama, the avatar of god Vishnu, and is regarded as an avatar of goddess Lakshmi. She is t ...
, and
Laila and Majnun; also (because we are not unaffected by the West)
Romeo and Juliet
''The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet'', often shortened to ''Romeo and Juliet'', is a Shakespearean tragedy, tragedy written by William Shakespeare about the romance between two young Italians from feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's ...
, and
Spencer Tracy and
Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Houghton Hepburn (May 12, 1907 – June 29, 2003) was an American actress whose Katharine Hepburn on screen and stage, career as a Golden Age of Hollywood, Hollywood leading lady spanned six decades. She was known for her headstrong ...
' (259)." Stewart (citing Hutcheon) suggests that ''Midnight's Children'' chronologically entwines characters from both India and the West, "with post-colonial Indian history to examine both the effect of these indigenous and non-indigenous cultures on the Indian mind and in the light of Indian independence."
''Midnight’s Children'' anticipates Rushdie’s later preoccupation with the socio-political responsibility of the writer, as articulated in his essay “Imaginary Homelands” (1991). In this essay, Rushdie reflects on the changing world and calls for politically committed writing that unmasks political shams and legerdemains. Both the novel and the essay express this concern by aiming to present the world differently, in ways that might bring about positive change. As Rushdie writes, “I once took part in a conference on modern writing at New College, Oxford. Various novelists, myself included, were talking earnestly of such matters as the need for new ways of describing the world.” He contends that describing the world is inherently political, and that “redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards changing it.” Therefore, he argues, the act of writing is political because “it is particularly at times when the state takes reality into its own hands, and sets about distorting it, altering the past to fit its present needs, that the making of the alternative realities of art, including the novel of memory, becomes politicized.” Likewise, in ''Midnight’s Children'', writing becomes a political act as Rushdie offers alternative realities that challenge the politician’s version of truth. Saleem, the protagonist, represents the author-figure who strives to assemble voices from diverse cultural centres to bring about positive change in a disconnected world, symbolized in the 1947 partition of India.
Style
''Midnight's Children'' has been called "a watershed in the post-independence development of the Indian English novel", to the extent that the decade after its 1981 publication has been called "post-Rushdie". During that decade, many novels inspired by ''Midnight's Children'' were written by both established and young Indian writers.
Rushdie's innovative use of magic realism allowed him to employ the nation-as-family allegory and at the same time confound it with an impossible telepathy among a multitude of children from a multitude of languages, cultures, regions and religions. No one genre dominates the entire novel, however. It encompasses the comic and the tragic, the real, the surreal, and the mythic. The postcolonial experience could not be expressed by a Western or Eastern, public or private, polarity or unity, any more than any single political party could represent all the people of the nation.
Rushdie also coined the word ''chutnification'' in the book to describe the adoption of Indian elements into the English language or culture.
A
chutney is a sauce for a dry base, originating from the Indian subcontinent.
Reception
Upon release, the book was generally well-received. According to Rushdie, "...I celebrated the book’s critical reception...The three I have never forgotten were written by Anita Desai in the Washington Post, by Clark Blaise in the New York Times and by Robert Towers in the New York Review of Books."
According to Rushdie, there was "one memorable bad review".
In his words from ''
Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...
'', "The BBC radio program “Kaleidoscope” had devoted a great deal of time to my novel, and given it the works: Indian music to introduce it, a reading, a sympathetic interview with me, and then it was over to their critic ... who unreservedly hated the book. The program’s presenter, Sheridan Morley, kept asking this critic (whose name I’ve forgotten) to find some little thing to praise. “But didn’t you think ... “ “Wouldn’t you at least agree that ... “ and so on. The critic was implacable. No, no, there was nothing he had liked at all. After the magnificent buildup, this negative intransigence was delightfully, bathetically funny."
''Midnight's Children'' was awarded the 1981
Booker Prize, the
English Speaking Union Literary Award, and the
James Tait Prize. It also was awarded
The Best of the Booker prize twice, in 1993 and 2008 (this was an award given out by the Booker committee to celebrate the 25th and 40th anniversary of the award).
The book went on to sell over one million copies in the UK alone.
In 1984 Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi
Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi (Given name, ''née'' Nehru; 19 November 1917 – 31 October 1984) was an Indian politician and stateswoman who served as the Prime Minister of India, prime minister of India from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 un ...
brought an action against the book in the British courts, claiming to have been defamed by a single sentence in the penultimate paragraph of chapter 28, in which her son
Sanjay Gandhi was said to have had a hold over his mother by his accusing her of contributing to his father
Feroze Gandhi's death through her neglect. The case was settled out of court when Salman Rushdie agreed to remove the offending sentence.
Adaptations
In the late 1990s the
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
was planning to film a five-part mini-series of the novel with
Rahul Bose in the lead, but due to pressure from the
Muslim community in Sri Lanka (a later Rushdie's novel, ''
The Satanic Verses'', published in 1988 caused
widespread uproar in the Muslim world), the filming permit was revoked and the project was cancelled. Later in 2003, the novel was adapted for the stage by the
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is a major British theatre company, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The company employs over 1,000 staff and opens around 20 productions a year. The RSC plays regularly in London, Stratf ...
.
''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' gave the play an average rating of 5.2 out of 10 based on reviews from multiple British newspapers.
BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. The station replaced the BBC Home Service on 30 September 1967 and broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes from the BBC's headquarters at Broadcasti ...
broadcast a dramatic adaptation in 2017 at the 70th anniversary of Indian independence, repeated in five parts in 2021.
Director
Deepa Mehta collaborated with Salman Rushdie on a new version of the story, the film ''
Midnight's Children''.
British-Indian actor
Satya Bhabha played the role of Saleem Sinai while other roles were played by
India
India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...
n actors
Shriya Saran,
Seema Biswas,
Shabana Azmi
Shabana Azmi (born 18 September 1950) is an Indian actress of film, television and theatre. Her career in the Hindi cinema, Hindi film industry has spanned Shabana Azmi filmography, over 160 films, mostly within independent and neorealist paral ...
,
Anupam Kher,
Siddharth Narayan,
Rahul Bose,
Soha Ali Khan,
Shahana Goswami, Anita Majumdar and
Darsheel Safary. The film was premiered in September 2012 at the
Toronto International Film Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF, often stylized as tiff) is one of the most prestigious and largest publicly attended film festivals in the world. Founded in 1976, the festival takes place every year in early September. The organi ...
(2012-09-09) and the
Vancouver International Film Festival
The Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) is an annual film festival held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, for two weeks in late September and early October.
The festival is operated by the Greater Vancouver International Film Festi ...
(2012-09-27). For an academic overview of the adaptations of ''Midnight's Children'', see Mendes and Kuortti (2016).
In June 2018 streaming service
Netflix
Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films and television shows from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple lang ...
announced plans to adapt ''Midnight's Children'' as an original Netflix TV series. By the end of 2019, the project had been abandoned. Although showrunner
Vishal Bhardwaj had received support from Rushdie for his script and had done much of the work on casting and scouting locations, after the compromises he had made on his poorly-received 2017 film ''
Rangoon'' he would not go ahead without agreement for a more ambitious project with a greater special effects budget than Netflix was prepared to agree.
See also
*
Jallianwala Bagh massacre
*
List of ''Midnight's Children'' characters
*
''Le Monde'' 100 Books of the Century
*
Mahagujarat movement
Notes
Further reading
* Batty, Nancy E.
The Art of Suspense. Rushdie’s 1001 (Mid-)Nights'. In: Fletcher, M.D. (ed.) Reading Rushdie. Perspectives on the fiction of Salman Rushdie. Amsterdam, 1994. 69–81.
*Santiago, Juan-Navarro.
The Dialogic Imagination of Salman Rushdie and Carlos Fuentes: National Allegories and the Scene of Writing in ''Midnight's Children'' and ''Cristóbal Nonato''." ''Neohelicon'' 20.2 (1993): 257–312.
External links
*
Midnight's Childrenat
thebookerprizes.com2009 retrospective reviewby
Jo Walton
Jo Walton (born 1964) is a Welsh-Canadian fantasy and science fiction writer and poet. She is best known for the fantasy novel '' Among Others'', which won the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 2012, and '' Tooth and Claw'', a Victorian-era novel w ...
{{Authority control
1981 British novels
Booker Prize–winning works
Family saga novels
British magic realism novels
Novels set in India
British novels adapted into films
Novels about the partition of India
Historical novels
Jonathan Cape books
Postcolonial novels
Cultural depictions of Indira Gandhi
Cultural depictions of Jawaharlal Nehru
Postmodern novels
Novels set in British India
Novels set in Mumbai
Novels set in Lahore
Works about the Emergency (India)