Midnight’s Children
One can easily get the plot from internet. I wouldn’t talk about the plot, but things that actually make this book a masterpiece and why the author of this book deserves all the accolades and awards that he received.
To start with, I was thinking about what genre this book can be classified into. I really couldn’t decide on that. So checked on Wikipedia and it classifies this book into a Genre called Magic Realism. This genre category is the closest fit for this book, but it is way beyond it. How? I will make an attempt to explain the beauty hidden in this book of 500 odd pages.
There is no limit on how deep a human mind can think. And in this depth of imagination, the variation and intent is what makes that imagination unimaginable. Putting India on the world map, this is a very boldly written piece of work, way back in 80’s, coming from a man who is not just way ahead of his generation in terms of thinking, but also very controversial, delightfully different, outspoken individual called Salman Rushdie. I would recommend a 2-min Wikipedia read on this novelist-par-excellence.
Through the central character Saleem Sinai, the evolving story of young India is narrated. It takes us through the pre-independence days to the partition of India to the congress rule of 3 decades to the emergency and finally to the socio-political challenges left open for the next generations. This central character happens to be born on the stroke of midnight of 15th August 1947, when India was gifted with independence. Saleem Sinai is gifted with telepathic dripping nose, using which he can sniff others’ minds. He later discovers that all children born in India close to the midnight of independence are gifted with some or the other special powers. Saleem attempts to discover the meaning of their gifts and acts as the convener, brining all these hundreds of diversely talented children together and fight the issues that the young nation is facing. Other than this, he himself gets involved in some of the major events (either by luck or by ignorance or sometimes due to boredom) that shaped the nation after independence. He goes through many geographical shifts across India due to wars, family business, and personal differences; and gets to sniff more and more minds over the course of time, thereby getting an essence of things to come. He even suffers from loss of memory for some good amount of time during one of the critical missions of Indian Army, and later on, getting it back, with the help of one of his childhood friends. As the Emergency is declared in the young country by a dynamic woman Prime Minister, all that is left for Saleem is to put the pieces of his life together and make some sense out if it, so that he could write a chronicle about the young evolving nation and his personal life, for his son, who also is gifted with similar powers.
This is a rough and a brief plot of the novel. What is important here is that every single aspect that he talks about has a greater significance than just being a mere event, for instance the convention of the Midnight’s Children is a reflection of the religious, political, economic, cultural, linguistic issues that India faced in its early statehood.
Some interesting trivia about this book that I gathered from the internet after I finished reading:
· In 1984 Indira Gandhi brought an action against the book in the British courts, claiming to have been defamed by a single sentence in chapter 28, penultimate paragraph, in which her son Sanjay Gandhi is said to have had a hold over his mother by him accusing her of contributing to his father's death through her neglect. The case was settled out of court when Salman Rushdie agreed to remove the offending sentence
· It was awarded the 1981 Booker Prize, the English Speaking Union Literary Award, and it was awarded 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).
· BBC was planning to film this novel with Rahul Bose in the lead but the project was cancelled due to pressure from the Muslim Community.
· Deepa Mehta is working on a film called Winds of Change, collaborating with Rushdie on the screenplay, with an excellent star cast, slated to release in 2012.
· Saleem Sinai’s (This character is roughly based on early life of Salman Rushdie) would-be in this novel is named Padma. And in real life, Salman Rushdie’s fourth wife is Padma Lakshmi, whom he married 2 decades after the novel’s release. Sheer coincidence or some fascination with the name Padma? Only the man knows J
