Introduction: Delve into the mesmerizing world of Midnight’s Children, where destiny intertwines with history, and legacies are forged in the fires of revolution. Immerse yourself in the captivating narrative of Saleem Sinai as he navigates through the tumultuous landscape of post-colonial India, where every twist and turn holds the promise of either triumph or tragedy.
Embark on a journey of discovery and enlightenment as we uncover the hidden depths of Midnight’s Children. Let the magic of Salman Rushdie’s prose captivate your imagination and ignite your curiosity.
Table of Contents
Genres
Historical Fiction, Magical Realism, Political Drama, Coming-of-Age, Multigenerational Saga, Post-Colonial Literature, Allegory, Metafiction, Satire, Epic Fiction, History, Biography, Memoir, Society, Culture
Midnight’s Children (1981) is the tale of Saleem Sinai, a child born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 – the exact moment of India’s independence. This biographical and historical coincidence shapes his destiny, connecting him to a thousand other midnight’s children endowed with miraculous powers and intertwining his own fate with that of his nation.
Midnight’s Children follows the extraordinary life of Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight on the day of India’s independence. Blessed with telepathic powers that connect him to the other children born at the same moment, Saleem finds himself at the center of a web of interconnected destinies. As he grows, Saleem witnesses the tumultuous events that shape post-colonial India, from Partition to the Emergency, all the while grappling with his own identity and legacy. Through Saleem’s eyes, Rushdie weaves a rich tapestry of history, mythology, and magic, offering a profound exploration of nationhood, identity, and the human condition.
Review
Midnight’s Children is a tour de force of storytelling, showcasing Rushdie’s unparalleled skill in crafting intricate narratives that blur the lines between reality and imagination. With its vivid characters, sweeping scope, and incisive commentary on politics and society, this novel transcends its genre to become a timeless masterpiece. Rushdie’s prose is nothing short of mesmerizing, drawing the reader into a world that is at once familiar and fantastical. Midnight’s Children is not merely a novel; it is an experience that will stay with you long after you turn the final page.
Introduction: A bite-sized magical realist classic
When Midnight’s Children was published in 1981, readers sensed that the literary map of India – and the world – was being redrawn. Rushdie’s novel was toweringly ambitious: in the words of one critic, he had tried to swallow India whole and spit it back out onto the page. He succeeded, too. As another critic put it, Midnight’s Children sounds like a continent finding its voice.
Independence
There’s almost too much to say, Saleem Sinai, the narrator of our story, tells us. The tale we’ll be hearing has a vast setting: the entire Indian subcontinent. The facts we’ll learn – and Saleem insists that they are facts – span an “excess” of lives, events, and places. It’s Saleem’s story, but it’s also the story of India, a nation of 600 million inhabitants at independence.
Saleem, then, starts with a question: where to begin this sprawling story?
He chooses the year 1915. Neither India nor its neighbors, Pakistan and Bangladesh, had been born – they were still gestating in the British Empire’s stomach. The first character we meet is a doctor who has returned to his native Kashmir from medical studies in Germany: Aadam Aziz.
We watch Aziz unfurling his prayer rug beneath Kashmir’s snow-capped mountains. He kneels, places his forehead on the ground, and then bangs his huge nose on the frost-hardened earth. Blood flows from his proboscis-like appendage, congealing into ruby-red droplets in the icy air. In that moment, he resolves to never again prostrate himself before a God.
Aadam Aziz’s nose is significant, but we have to fast-forward to understand why.
It’s August 14, 1947, and we find ourselves in an affluent suburb of the port city of Bombay, India’s window to the west. We see a young couple in a hospital room. The husband, Ahmed Sinai, paces back and forth; his wife, Amina, the daughter of Aziz, lies in a bed, clutching her swollen stomach. Both the city and the Sinais are expectant.
Britain, the power on whose empire the sun was never supposed to set, is relinquishing its hold on the subcontinent. The Muslim-majority state of Pakistan is two days old – at midnight, its Hindu-majority neighbor, India, will celebrate its own independence. While crowds light fireworks in Bombay’s bustling streets, the Sinais await the birth of their first child.
He tumbles into the world at the stroke of midnight. A second boy is born at exactly the same time in the adjoining room. These are the first of the 1,001 children born in the opening hour of India’s independence whom Saleem will later call “midnight’s children.”
These two boys’ futures are mapped out: the first, the son of a Hindu beggar, will grow up in poverty in Bombay’s backstreets. The second, the son of a Muslim landowner, in the comfort of a well-appointed villa. However, a nursemaid, discontented with a system that fixes their fates from the start, secretly exchanges the infants. The beggar’s boy receives the Muslim name of Saleem and goes home with the Sinais – their actual child is given the Hindu name of Shiva and goes home with the beggar.
The switch isn’t noticed for many years, though. Saleem, everyone says as they admire the baby’s huge cucumber-like nose, looks exactly like his grandfather!
ANALYSIS
There are lots of errors in Midnight’s Children. Saleem, for example, gets everything from the date of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination to the routes of Bombay buses wrong.
Mostly, these mistakes are deliberate – not, as some early readers assumed, the product of sloppy fact-checking. As Rushdie put it in an essay in 1983, memory and history – the overlapping themes of his novel – are “always ambiguous.” Facts, after all, are hard to establish and open to interpretation. The realities we construct from them are just as likely to reflect prejudice, ignorance, and misconception as they are perceptiveness and knowledge.
Saleem is engaged in the business of remembering, and one of the “simplest truths” about memories according to Rushdie is that many of them are false. That Saleem begins his story with a fact – his grandfather’s huge nose – that leads directly to a misconception about identity is Rushdie’s way of warning us to take what we’re about to hear with a grain of salt.
Saleem’s gift
We lurch forward in time again to a hot Bombay night in 1977. We see Saleem hunched over a desk in a room above a pickle factory that fills the air with the pungent scents of chutneys.
Saleem believes he’s close to death. His body, he says, is cracking and falling apart. His only companion is the factory girl peering over his shoulder. Padma, as she’s called, nurses Saleem, cooks for him, loves him. Mostly, though, she listens to his stories.
Tonight, she’s impatient. It’s taken you a hundred pages to get to your birth, she admonishes – at this rate, you’ll be dead before you reach your conclusion. Saleem counters that storytelling is hard – people and events have a way of leaking into each other, like flavors in a chutney. But he takes her point and promises to skip the digressions.
He was “handcuffed to history” at birth, he says. India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, sent him a letter saying as much. As India’s first-born son, Saleem’s life would be a mirror to the nation’s, Nehru said, and Indians would watch over it with the “closest attention.” The expectation was suffocating. For nine years, Saleem, an unpopular child lacking any great talents, saw himself as a failure. But then everything changed.
It was 1958. His family’s life was in disarray. His father’s assets had been frozen – the state’s none-too-subtle way of telling Muslims they belonged in Pakistan, not India. His father took to drinking, and his mother grew despondent. His sister, Jamila, born in 1948, terrorized everyone with her favorite game of setting people’s shoes alight. Saleem began hiding in a washing chest.
He was in that chest when his mother came into the bathroom one day and began undressing. Horrified, Saleem burrowed deeper into the dirty laundry, but a drawstring slithered its way into one of his huge nostrils. He sneezed. His shocked mother issued her usual punishment for childish transgressions: twenty-four hours of silence.
Saleem heard voices that night for the first time. He thought they must be the angels who’d spoken to Mohammad and Moses. He announced his prophethood at breakfast the next morning. His mother started crying. His hungover father, who was in no mood for blasphemous jokes, slapped Saleem so hard he never recovered the hearing in his left ear.
He apologized for his prank and kept the voices to himself after that. Later, he realized they weren’t angels – they were the voices of Bombayites! The more he honed his abilities by eavesdropping on the internal monologues of taxi drivers, politicians, and prostitutes, the more his powers grew. Soon, he was able to tune in to the innermost thoughts of any one of India’s six hundred million inhabitants. This gift must have better uses than collecting salacious gossip and cheating on school tests, he thought, but to what purpose was he supposed to put it?
ANALYSIS
Midnight’s Children often alludes to One Thousand and One Nights. In that collection of folk tales, the narrator, Scheherazade, postpones her execution at the hands of a jealous and despotic sultan by telling him a new story each day and leaving it unfinished until the next.
Sensing his own death, Saleem says he must work fast, faster than Scheherazade if he’s to capture the meaning of his life. Admittedly, working at that pace risks compounding the errors of a failing memory, but even fragmentary, faulty stories contain something important.
What, exactly? Historical context can help us here. When Rushdie began working on his novel in the mid-1970s, India declared a state of emergency. Under the leadership of Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, the government cracked down on dissent and enforced an officially sanctioned account of the nation’s past and future. For intellectuals like Rushdie, this authoritarian turn threatened the very source of India’s vitality – the plurality of its traditions, voices, and points of view.
Saleem’s story, then, resembles Rushdie’s own novel: both insist on representing India in all its sprawling richness and occasionally contradictory diversity.
Midnight’s children
1,001 children were born during the first hour of India’s independence. 581 survived to the age of ten – the age at which Saleem discovered them. Each had miraculous powers.
Among them was a boy who could walk through mirrors and another who could alter his size at will. One girl had a tongue so sharp her words literally cut the targets of her wrath – a second, fingers so green she could grow aubergines in a desert. Others, like the boy with the gills of a trout or the girl with a beard reaching down to her ankles, had less enviable powers.
These powers weren’t distributed at random: they were greater or weaker depending on how close to twelve o’clock the child had entered the world. Two children born at the stroke of midnight possessed the most extraordinary abilities: our mind-reading narrator and a boy who’d been granted the powers of his namesake – Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.
At first, Saleem could only listen to the thoughts of midnight’s children. In 1960, when he was twelve, he learned how to communicate with them telepathically. That was how he met Shiva.
Shiva recognized Saleem – he was that “little rich boy” whose family owned an estate outside Bombay. He mocked Saleem’s easy existence, comparing it to the hard life that had taught him the value of his own gifts. His father had tried to break Shiva’s legs – the more pitiful a beggar looked, he said, the more he could earn. Shiva saved himself by pinning his father between his powerful knees and squeezing until he broke both of his arms.
But Shiva needed Saleem – it was the latter’s telepathy that connected the midnight’s children. Together, they founded what Saleem called the MCC, the Midnight Children’s Conference – a regular telepathic meeting of all 581 children. Saleem hoped the MCC would become a democratic society that harnessed its members’ powers to serve India and its people.
Shiva had a less idealistic vision: the collective powers of the MCC, he thought, should serve its members. To his mind, high-minded talk about “democracy” was little more than a sham. Only deluded idealists, or rich kids who wanted to boss other people around, talked that way. Shiva, in short, was a pessimist. What people really cared about, he said, was themselves.
Saleem and Shiva had reached a deadlock – neither could persuade the other to take their view of things. Lacking an overarching purpose, the MCC became a talking shop – a midnight parliament that failed to do much of anything. Slowly but surely, its members lost interest. By 1963, even its idealistic founder had given up on it. For fifteen-year-old Saleem, the collapse of the MCC confirmed his own sense of himself as a failure. If Indians were watching over his life with the “closest attention,” he concluded, they must be terribly disappointed.
ANALYSIS
The optimism of the early post-independence period was waning by the early 1960s. Border clashes with China shocked Indians who had planned for peace, not war. Modernization efforts had boosted GDP but failed to move the dial on rampant poverty, inequality, and illiteracy.
Saleem often refers to the 1962 general election. Nehru was re-elected, but Communist parties also made advances, suggesting a growing appetite for change. Saleem also hints at corruption. Later on, we learn that Shiva was one of the street toughs hired by the ruling party to intimidate voters outside polling stations during that election.
Saleem believes his destiny is “indissolubly chained” to his country’s, so it’s unsurprising that his disillusionment coincides with a national mood of disappointment. While the collapse of the MCC can be read as an allegory for the failures of Indian democracy, Saleem and Shiva’s arguments about altruism and self-interest represent contrasting visions of India’s future.
The war
The last chapter of Saleem’s story, we jump forward in time once more. It’s now 1970, the eve of an apocalyptic war. A lot has happened in the intervening years, however, so let’s start there.
In 1963, Saleem’s father lost everything. Bankrupt and despondent, he moved the family to Pakistan. Saleem developed a sinus infection shortly after their arrival – a week later, he was rushed to hospital to have his sinuses drained. When we woke up, he was no longer telepathic. His nose, though, could now detect psychological and moral as well as physical odors.
Saleem wanted to be told what to do with these new abilities rather than figuring it out himself, so he joined the army. His commander sent him to CUITA, the Canine Unit for Tracking and Intelligence Activities, and he was deployed as a “human dog” to sniff out traitors.
Traitors at that time meant the Awami League, an independence movement in East Pakistan – today’s Bangladesh. CUITA was sent to Bangladesh in 1971. Saleem was given a small team and ordered to track down Sheikh Mujib, the Awami League’s leader.
Saleem picked up Mujib’s scent and followed it into dense mangrove forests. For seven months, his team battled giant flies, scorpions, and leeches as they chased Mujib around humid jungles. Exhausted, they gave up and headed north to the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka.
The road to Dhaka was littered with evidence of the Pakistani army’s genocidal rampage. Saleem crossed ditches filled with corpses, entered scorched villages, and heard men, women, and children talk about slit throats, rapes, and massacres. He saw newspaper reports of ten million people fleeing to India. On December 3, 1971, a hawker told them the latest: the Indian army was entering the war under the command of a man with enormous, powerful knees.
Pakistani troops surrendered on December 17, 1971. It was the largest surrender of armed personnel since 1945, but Saleem wasn’t among the captured men. A witch called Parvati had recognized Saleem as a fellow member of the MCC in Dhaka and spirited him back to Delhi in an enchanted basket. He knew he was living on borrowed time, though. Shiva had learned whose child he really was. It was only a matter of time before he caught up to Saleem.
Shiva was a powerful man now – a decorated war hero who had the ear of India’s iron-fisted prime minister, Indira Gandhi. When Gandhi ordered the clearance of one of Delhi’s oldest neighborhoods, a maze of alleyways and brick houses known as the Magician’s Ghetto, she put Shiva in charge of the operation. That was where he found Saleem.
That was 1975 – the year an increasingly paranoid Gandhi declared a state of emergency. Gandhi saw threats around every corner. She loathed political parties, trade unions, artists, intellectuals, lawyers, and clubs. The group she really feared, however, was a shadowy organization whose existence was a mere rumor: the Midnight Children’s Conference.
When Shiva reported that he had captured its leader, Gandhi ordered him to torture Saleem until he gave up the names of every MCC member. One by one, the midnight’s children were rounded up and sterilized, destroying their powers and nullifying their threat to the state.
Saleem returned to Bombay after his release. His first meal as a free man featured a chutney whose pungent flavors transported him back to his childhood. On a whim, he visited the pickle factory that had made it. When he arrived, he found Padma guarding the main gate.
You know the rest. They fell in love and moved into a tiny room above the factory. Padma nursed Saleem and cooked for him. Mostly, though, she listened to his stories.
ANALYSIS
The atrocities committed by the Pakistani army in Bangladesh leave Saleem struggling to find the right words. Ten million, he says, like all numbers larger than 1,001, is a number that “refuses to be understood.” The scale is inhuman – it defies imagination. Worse, it forces us to adopt the language of accounting, turning people into statistics.
For Saleem, this kind of abstract accounting of life is nothing but “cold history.” It’s lifeless, meaningless. History must be warmed up and brought to life to achieve meaning. This is why telling stories matters: it individualizes and differentiates, defying the statistical urge to clump and cluster. It recognizes and celebrates plurality. That, ultimately, is why Rushdie believes democracies require novelists.
Conclusion
Salman Rushdie intertwines the life of his narrator, Saleem Sinai, with India’s history after independence. Telepathically linked to 1,001 midnight’s children, Saleem navigates a tumultuous life that mirrors India’s postcolonial upheavals.
About the Author
Salman Rushdie