My guess is that most readers, on hearing the name Salman Rushdie, think first of the furor that accompanied the publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses—the rage of Muslim extremists who saw the book as blasphemous in its treatment of the Prophet Muhammed. The book was subsequently banned in twenty different nations, including India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and moved the Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, to declare a fatwa (an Islamic legal ruling) against Rushdie, who since has suffered many attempts on his life, most recently in August 2022, when he lost his right eye.
The novel that made Rushdie’s international reputation, however, and is considered by many to be one of the great novels in the English language, is his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children. It came in as number 90 on the Modern Library list of 1998. The Norwegian Book Club list ranked it number 38 on its list of the greatest works in world literature. It also appears on the Time magazine list, the Guardian list, and the BBC list of greatest British novels. Midnight’s Children won the 1981 Booker Prize, most prestigious of all British awards, and in 1993 was named the best book to win the Booker in the 25 years of the prize’s existence—and then in 2008 best all-time winner in the 40 years of the prize. And it ranks as number 73 (alphabetically) on my own list of the 100 most lovable novels in the English language.
The novel defies easy summary. It is a sprawling epic of the whole history of modern independent India as reflected in the life of a single Indian—a boy named Saleem Sinai, who is born on the stroke of midnight the morning of August 15, 1947, the very moment the independent nation of India is born. Like many of Rushdie’s novels, this one makes extensive use of “magic realism”: Saleem, protagonist and narrator, is born with a huge nose that gives him a fantastically perceptive sense of smell (so sensitive that at one point he is actually drafted as a bloodhound in the Pakistani army). Even more importantly, he turns out to have been born with telepathic powers that enable him to contact all the children across the country who were born in India between midnight and 1:00 A.M. on their independence day. Each of these children was born with special powers of one kind or another.
Saleem says that being born at the very moment of India’s independence made him “handcuffed to history.” He begins his narrative at the age of 30, feeling that his body is cracking under the weight of “too much history,” and that as a kind of personification of his nation, he is disintegrating into “six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, oblivious, dust.” He begins his story with his grandfather, Aadam Aziz. A doctor educated in Germany, Aadam is called to attend Naseem Ghani, the ailing daughter of a rich local landowner in Kashmir. But he is only allowed to examine her through a small hole cut into the center of a large sheet that covers the rest of her body. After numerous illnesses, Aadam and Naseem are married, and move to Agra for Aadam’s university job. Here Aadam is attracted to Gandhi’s peaceful protests, and is witness to the brutal oppression of the British military, whose victims he attends as doctor.
Amina, daughter of Aadam and Naseem, meets and marries Ahmed Sinai and the two move to Bombay. They buy a large house from the British colonist William Methwold, who is returning to England in advance of India’s independence. Amina goes into labor on the eve of Independence Day, as does a poor woman from the same estate who dies after giving birth. Both children are born on the stroke of midnight. The midwife Mary Pereira switches the nametags of the children, so that the Sinai boy is identified as belonging to the poor mother, and the poor child is given to the Sinais and raised as Saleem, while their true son grows up as a poor orphan named Shiva. Mary offers to act as nurse for Amina.
As Saleem grows, his large nose acts as a kind of antenna that allows him to hear voices, and he realizes these are the thoughts of all the other children born during the first hour of India’s independence. All have some kind of magic power. He is able to organize them in his mind to create a kind of virtual meeting that he hopes will help unite the different factions of the new India (reflecting the early attempts of the multi-cultural nation to come together). The two most notable of these children are the girl Parvati-the-witch, who is Saleem’s ally, and the boy Shiva “of the knees”—called so because he has a pair of crushingly powerful knees—who unbeknownst to either of them is Saleem’s fellow changeling, and becomes his nemesis, breaking apart the community Saleem had hoped to begin.
After some years, Saleem and his family move to Pakistan, where they are when the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 erupts. An airstrike kills his family, and causes Saleem to be struck in the head with a spittoon, sending him into months of amnesia. Drafted into the army, his acute sense of smell makes him as good a tracker as any dog. But after witnessing horrors during the war, he escapes into the jungle. After a mythic exile in the jungle of Sundarban, he is restored to his memory and his true sense of himself. When he emerges, the war is over, and India is celebrating her victory. He meets Parvati-the-witch at a parade, and she recognizes him. He falls in love with her, but is not able to father a child with her. Parvati puts a spell on Shiva, now a great war hero, and he impregnates her, but quickly leaves her, and Saleem agrees to father Parvati’s unborn child.
Parvati goes into labor just when unrest in the country reaches the point where the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declares a state of emergency. This Emergency lasts for nearly two years, during which the Prime Minister has authority to rule by decree, to cancel elections and to suspend civil liberties. Parvati gives birth to a son, but Salem and other surviving children of midnight are kidnapped by Shiva, working for Mrs. Gandhi, to be forcibly sterilized. Released from imprisonment in 1977 after the Emergency, Saleem is approaching his thirtieth birthday, and the point at which he will begin his narrative—but I’ll keep the remainder of the story from spoiling the ending for you.
It is interesting that, despite the scathing criticism of Mrs. Gandhi’s thirst for power that fills these pages on the Emergency, and though she was in power again from 1980 to her assassination, when she decided to sue Rushdie for libel in 1984 it was not for these criticisms, but for a single sentence in which Rushdie portrays her son Sanjay Gandhi as complaining that she helped bring about the death of his father, Feroze, through neglect. Rushdie settled the case out of court by removing that sentence from the novel.
Reading Midnight’s Children is a feast for the mind interested in the entire history of literature, both Western and South Asian, as Rushdie makes use of a plethora of sources that underscore the post-colonial nature of the novel. Saleem, who tells his magical realist story to his betrothed bride Padma, recalls Scheherazade who tells her magical Arabian Nights stories (many of which originate in India) to her husband each evening. Like the variety of tales in the Arabian Nights, Midnight’s Children comprises comic and tragic tales, realist, mythical, and magical stories.
Rushdie himself has said that, in Midnight’s Children, “I wanted to write a novel in which memory and politics, love and hate would mingle on every page.” He says that he wanted to write a book like the classics Dead Souls, Tristram Shandy, Bleak House, and Gargantua and Pantagruel, “books that try to gather up large armfuls of the world,” as he put it, but that were innovative and bordering on magic realism. And he says he also had in mind modern novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude (that magic realist classic), or The Tin Drum (with its gnome-like protagonist who witnesses so much of history), or Catch-22 (with its post-modernist structure), while at the same time keeping in mind the Indian traditions of expansive epics (the Mahabharata and Ramayana) and fabulist tales (like the Arabian Nights). He wanted a multigenerational family novel like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, but one that, because set to a large extent in Bombay, played with plots typical of Bollywood movies. All of these influences can be experienced in the expansive narrative of Midnight’s Children.
The postcolonial narrative of Midnight’s Children could not help but consider the question of language, since Rushdie writes a kind of biography of the new nation but uses the language of the colonizers. English was the right language for the sake of readability, Rushdie asserts, but “writing in classical English felt wrong, like a misrepresentation of the rich linguistic environment of the book’s setting.” And so, Rushdie says, he took his cue from Philip Roth, who tended to season his English with untranslated Yiddish words (like zetz and kishkes) that are understood in context. Thus Saleem might use the term rutputty, which a reader would understand by the context is a ramshackle automobile.
In trying to render India in prose, Rushdie adds that the “most obvious fact about the subcontinent” is its crowdedness, its “throng of humanity”:
My answer was to tell a crowd of stories, deliberately to overcrowd the narrative, so that “my” story, the main thrust of the novel, would need to push its way, so to speak, through a crowd of other stories.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Rushdie asserts that his chief theme was that “All of India belonged to all of us.” Unlike the Islamic state of Pakistan, partitioned off from India on the day before Indian independence, India was from the beginning intended to be a secular state, in which the many different cultural traditions, religions, and languages form a single multicultural unity. Thus Saleem of the giant nose could be reflective of elephant-nosed Ganesh, the Hindu god of literature (even though Saleem—and Rushdie himself—were born Muslims). The telepathic forum of all midnight’s children reflected Saleem’s vision of that dream. The authoritarian crackdown of Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency, as presented in the novel, was a betrayal of that vision of democratic multiculturalism. And Rushdie believes the book is just as relevant today, with India’s recent veering once more to the authoritarian right. Read the book yourself, and see if you agree. You won’t regret it.
[my quotations of Rushdie’s stated opinions come from this 2021 interview on the occasion of the novel’s 40thanniversary: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/03/salman-rushdie-on-midnights-children-at-40-india-is-no-longer-the-country-of-this-novel