Midnight's Children

• 1. Introduction

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  Saleem Sinai was born precisely at midnight on the 15th of August 1947, the exact moment India became an independent country. That coincidence is the engine of Midnight's Children, the 1981 novel by the Indian-British writer Salman Rushdie. Saleem is, as the book insists, exactly as old as his nation, and his body and his fate are chained to its history. Rushdie's second novel was published by Jonathan Cape, with a cover designed by Bill Botten. It tells of India's passage from British colonial rule to independence and partition, narrated by Saleem himself. How does one child come to carry the burden of an entire country? What does it mean to write a chronicle that is at once a personal history and a national one? And how did a book about telepathic infants become so contested that a prime minister took it to court? The answers run from a jungle exile to a London radio studio to a settlement reached on a single deleted sentence.

• 2. A Nation Born At Midnight

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  Every child born in India between 12 a.m. and 1 a.m. on the 15th of August 1947 is, in this story, imbued with special powers. Saleem discovers this and uses his telepathy to assemble what the novel calls the Midnight Children's Conference. He acts as a telepathic conduit, drawing hundreds of geographically scattered children into contact and trying to discover the meaning of their gifts. The conference mirrors the cultural, linguistic, religious, and political differences of a vastly diverse new nation in its early statehood. Those born closest to the stroke of midnight wield the most powerful gifts of all. Shiva of the Knees, Saleem's nemesis, and Parvati, called Parvati-the-witch, are two of these children, each with notable gifts and roles in Saleem's story. The novel is built as three books, and it opens not with Saleem but with the Sinai family, tracing the events that lead up to the fall of British Colonial India and the partition. The structure makes the family the first vessel for the nation's allegory, before the burden passes to the single boy born on the hour.

• 3. Wars, Exile, And The Emergency

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  Amnesia overtakes Saleem during the wars that plague the subcontinent, as his family begins a series of migrations. He recovers his memory only after entering a quasi-mythological exile in the jungle of Sundarban, where he is re-endowed with it and reconnects with his childhood friends. The later chapters turn toward the Emergency proclaimed by Indira Gandhi, and her son Sanjay's cleansing of the Jama Masjid slum. Saleem is held for a time as a political prisoner, and these passages carry scathing criticisms of Indira Gandhi's over-reach during the Emergency, along with a personal lust for power bordering on godhood. The Emergency signals the end of the potency of the Midnight Children. Little is left for Saleem but to gather the few pieces of his life he can still find and write his chronicle, addressed to his son, who is, like his father, both chained and supernaturally endowed by history.

• 4. Telling A Tale Aloud

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  Saleem recounts his life story orally to his wife-to-be, Padma, and the critic Nicholas Stewart treats that frame as the key to the book. In his essay Magic realism in relation to the post-colonial and Midnight's Children, Stewart calls the narrative self-referential. Within a single paragraph Saleem speaks of himself in the first person, wishing upon himself the curse of Nadir Khan, and in the third, crying I tell you, it is true. Stewart links this to indigenous Indian culture and to the orally recounted Arabian Nights. The events themselves echo those tales: the attempt to electrocute Saleem at the latrine, or his journey in a basket of invisibility. Stewart also writes that the narrative comprises and compresses Indian cultural history. Saleem muses, Once upon a time, there were Radha and Krishna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and Majnun; also, because we are not unaffected by the West, Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Citing Hutcheon, Stewart suggests the book entwines characters from India and the West with post-colonial Indian history.

• 5. Redescribing The World

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  Rushdie's essay Imaginary Homelands, published in 1991, articulates a conviction the novel anticipates: the socio-political responsibility of the writer. In it he calls for politically committed writing that unmasks political shams and legerdemains. He recalls a conference on modern writing at New College, Oxford, where various novelists, himself included, were talking earnestly of such matters as the need for new ways of describing the world. He argues that describing the world is inherently political, and that redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards changing it. The act of writing turns political, he contends, 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. In Midnight's Children, Saleem becomes that author-figure, striving to assemble voices from diverse cultural centres to bring about positive change in a disconnected world, symbolized in the 1947 partition of India.

• 6. The Post-Rushdie Decade

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  Critics have called Midnight's Children a watershed in the post-independence development of the Indian English novel. The decade after its 1981 publication has even been labelled post-Rushdie, and during it many novels inspired by the book were written by both established and young Indian writers. Rushdie's use of magic realism let him deploy the nation-as-family allegory and then confound it with an impossible telepathy among children from many languages, cultures, regions and religions. No single genre dominates the book. It encompasses the comic and the tragic, the real, the surreal, and the mythic, refusing any Western or Eastern, public or private polarity. Rushdie even coined a word in its pages: chutnification, describing the adoption of Indian elements into the English language or culture. A chutney, the novel reminds its reader, is a sauce for a dry base, originating from the Indian subcontinent.

• 7. Prizes And A Lawsuit

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  In 1981 the novel won the Booker Prize, alongside the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the English Speaking Union Literary Award. It was singled out again twice as the Best of the Booker, in 1993 and 2008, awards the Booker committee gave to mark the prize's 25th and 40th anniversaries. In 2003 the book reached number 100 on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's best-loved novels, and it has sold over one million copies in the UK alone. Rushdie remembered three reviews above all, written by Anita Desai in the Washington Post, Clark Blaise in the New York Times, and Robert Towers in the New York Review of Books. He also recalled one memorable bad review on the BBC radio programme Kaleidoscope, where presenter Sheridan Morley kept pressing the critic to praise some little thing, and the critic remained implacable. A sharper conflict came in 1984, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sued in the British courts over a single sentence in the penultimate paragraph of chapter 28. It claimed Sanjay Gandhi had a hold over his mother through accusing her of contributing to his father Feroze Gandhi's death by neglect. Rushdie agreed to remove the sentence and the case was settled out of court.

• 8. Screens And Stages

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  In the late 1990s the BBC planned a five-part mini-series with Rahul Bose in the lead, but the filming permit was revoked under pressure from the Muslim community in Sri Lanka, fallout from the 1988 uproar over Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, and the project was cancelled. The story reached the stage instead, adapted by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2003. BBC Radio 4 broadcast a dramatic adaptation in 2017, on the 70th anniversary of Indian independence, and repeated it in five parts in 2021. Director Deepa Mehta then worked with Rushdie on a film version, with British-Indian actor Satya Bhabha as Saleem Sinai and a cast including Shriya Saran, Seema Biswas, Shabana Azmi, Anupam Kher, Siddharth Narayan, Rahul Bose, Soha Ali Khan, Shahana Goswami, Anita Majumdar and Darsheel Safary. It premiered in September 2012 at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Vancouver International Film Festival. In June 2018 Netflix announced an original series adaptation, but by the end of 2019 it had been abandoned. Showrunner Vishal Bhardwaj, despite Rushdie's support for his script and his work on casting and locations, would not proceed without a more ambitious project and a greater special effects budget than Netflix was prepared to agree.