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Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Midnight’s Children, first published almost 40 years ago in 1981, is a novel that is always worth revisiting, but feels especially relevant in the current political era. The novel tells the story of the life of Saleem Sinai, a boy who is born at midnight, on the exact moment in 1947 when the country of India achieves independence from colonial Britain. The novel traces his life, roughly from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, including a brief preamble concerning Saleem’s Kashmir-born grandparents, emphasizing the ways in which Saleem’s life mirrors the political life of India. By virtue of his notable birth, Saleem joins the ranks of “midnight’s children”, a group of one thousand and one Indian children born in the midnight hour on the day of their nation’s independence, who are all endowed with special magical powers, the strength of which decline as the exact birth time ranges farther from midnight. Being born exactly at the stroke of midnight, Saleem is endowed with the power to enter the minds of any of his countrymen, a power that he uses to host a conversation between the midnight’s children despite their geographical distance.
Not only does Saleem’s mind become a political forum, but the events of his life become a mirror of the political climate in India: his birth is the birth of a free nation, and the conflicts between India and Pakistan occur in the sequences of Saleem’s most fraught personal eras. The novel is about plurality, and the many lives of Saleem Sinai, who transforms in character and locality throughout the novel, in addition to literally occupying the minds of other characters. The first duality emerges during Saleem’s birth, when a nurse switches his parents’ baby with a baby whose mother dies in childbirth and is left to grow up with his father, and impoverished singer. This other child, Shiva, is Saleem’s proverbial evil twin; he is a constant reminder of the life that Saleem could have had, and one of Saleem’s most potent nemeses.
Shiva is in fact the one who turns in the other midnight’s children to “The Widow”, Prime Minister Indira Ghandi, in 1977. She castrates the gifted children in an effort to consolidate power over the Opposition Party and prevent future heirs to India’s political throne. The complex plotting that gets us to these near-final moments of despair are indeed difficult to trace due to the novel’s format and breadth, but are actually contained fully in a prophecy told to Saleem’s mother before his birth, “A son … who will never be older than his motherland – neither older nor younger. … There will be two heads – but you shall see only one – there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees. … Newspaper praises him, two mothers raise him! Bicyclists love him – but, crowds will shove him! Sisters will weep; cobras will creep. … Washing will hide him – voices will guide him! Friends mutilate him – blood will betray him! … Spittoons will brain him – doctors will drain him – jungle will claim him – wizards reclaim him! Soldiers will try him – tyrants will fry him … He will have sons without having sons! He will be old before he is old! And he will die … before he is dead.”
The plotting of this novel is nothing short of magnificent, it is a story told in fragments by the adult Saleem recounting his childhood, told in a colloquial and charming voice that forces the reader to buy into the narrative. While the plot is certainly complex, it maintains a liveliness in tone, and a balance between large and small scale details that allow it to feel both mythically magnificent and staggeringly alive. There are no superfluous sentences, and every word feels weighted with history but simultaneously animate. I am not the first, and I will not be the last to say that this is one of the strongest novels of our modern age.
Midnight’s Children is one of the first cultural histories of India not written by a colonialist, and thus Rushdie endows his narrative landscape with a lushness and flavor that is entirely unique to India’s novelistic tradition. In today’s climate where “own voices” literature has become a hot topic, Midnight’s Children feels especially relevant as one of the earlier efforts of a native author to reclaim his nation of origin, to write a novel about India that is for and by Indians. With linguistic veracity, and a healthy inflection of pop-culture references, Rushdie weaves together a novel that works to understand the plurality of Indian identity, that could only emerge from the pen of a true Indian novelist.
In the year 2020, as new citizenship laws in India have created discord between the minority Muslim population, and the Hindu-nationalist government, this novel feels prime for revisiting. As is true of the most brilliant of historical epics, Midnight’s Children feels so fresh almost forty years later because of its insistence upon the historicity of conflict, and how it uses historical tensions to predict future conflicts. Understanding the history of Indian-Pakistani relations is crucial to understand how the modern conflict will evolve over time, and Rushdie’s novel is an immensely readable primer on the issues that have plagued the region since its very inception. As The New York Times‘ original review stated, “The literary map of India is about to be redrawn, Midnight’s Children sounds like a continent finding its voice.” (Source).