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Just 11 days to go for the release of Salman Rushdie's memoirs. Here's an essay I wrote about his most popular work of fiction during my stint at Columbia Journalism School.
In the
summer of 1981, Salman Rushdie delivered a lecture at the India International
Centre in New Delhi. The crowd grew so “unexpectedly large that it had spilled
out under the trees and loudspeakers had to be set up to broadcast his voice, a
voice that everyone present recognized instantly as being the voice of a new
age: strong, original and demanding of attention,” recalls Anita Desai in her
introduction to Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
Rushdie’s second novel is an
arresting allegory for independent India that’s narrated through the life of
Saleem Sinai, who was born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 – just
like his country. He’s endowed with a strong sense of smell, a dripping nose
and the ability to teleport himself to wars.
Midnight’s Children is considered the first “Indian” novel because it examined
India as a whole rather than being rooted in a particular region. It gave confidence to future Indian writers
that they could write about their country in an English that’s distinctly
Indian. It showed publishers in the West that books by Indian writers can be
commercial successes. Thirty-one years later, the filmmaker Deepa Mehta is
adapting the flamboyant novel into a movie that’s scheduled to release in
December this year.
The novel attracted laudatory reviews and commercial success
in India when it was published. “It is, in fictional terms, one of the most
ferocious indictments of India’s evolution since Independence,” wrote Sunil
Sethi in the India Today magazine in 1981. “Salman Rushdie, as a
novelist, has chosen his weapons of crucifixion, as few journalists, analysts,
soothsayers or historians have or possibly can.” By 1984, the book had sold
4,000 hardback copies and 45,000 paperback editions - substantial figures for
an infant publishing industry.
Midnight’s Children
closed the Anglicized chapter of Indian writing in English. Rushdie’s
predecessors like GV Desani and Mulk Raj Anand depended on Western
sensibilities for their success. Desani’s 1948 book All About Mad Hatter was
the story of an Anglo-Malay man in search of enlightenment. It created a stir
in the literary salons of London rather than the sedate bookstores of India
while Anand’s work explored the themes of untouchability. The English poet
Anthony Burgess wrote the preface to All About Mad Hatter while EM
Forster wrote one for Anand’s book, Untouchables.
The pages of Midnight’s Children opened readers to
themes that were never before written about, only experienced. Partition,
marginality, abuse of political power and being a Muslim in India bind the
pages and the boisterous generations of Saleem Sinai’s family. In doing so, Midnight’s
Children followed the path of European and Latin American post-modern
literature that mirrored a nation’s progress, in works by such authors as Gabriel
Garcia-Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Its success gave a future generation of
Indian writers like Mukul Kesavan and Aravind Adiga the confidence to write
ambitious novels about India. Kesavan’s 1995 book, Looking Through Glass,
is an odyssey through an India gets divided along sectarian lines en route to
Independence. Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger,
touched on themes endemic in contemporary urban Indian discourse: corruption,
Hindu-Muslim tensions and an economic rivalry with China.
A contentious element of Midnight’s Children is its
prose. Rushdie uses translations of Indian idioms and Bollywood lyrics to make
the novel accessible to a wider readership. “His real focus was on Indians
speaking in English,” said Amardeep Singh, a professor of Indian literature at
LeHigh University. “He showed the world that the language belongs as much to
India as it does to the United States and the United Kingdom.” Some critics
believe that this was Rushdie’s attempt to make the book appealing to a Western
audience. Rushdie himself claimed that he never had an audience in mind for the
book. “I didn’t conceive of an ideal reader except perhaps myself,” he said in
an interview with the India Today magazine in 1981. “I was trying
primarily to write the kind of book about India I would like to read.”
The India of Midnight’s Children was churned in a
cauldron fired by the forces of economic liberalization. It gave birth to a new
India whose global ambitions and darker realities are now explained by writers
like Suketu Mehta, Aravind Adiga and Sonia Faleiro. Their work seems closer to
the phrase ‘Indian writing in English’ than Midnight’s Children. “When I
teach Indian literature, Midnight’s Children is a tough sell to my
students,” said Singh. “They find it hard to accept the novel as Indian. On the
other hand, when I mention Suketu Mehta’s book, their jaws drop.” It is
important to distinguish that Midnight’s Children is a novel whereas
Mehta’s book, Maximum City, is a riveting memoir about contemporary
Bombay. Rushdie uses fantasy and magic realism to tell an allegorical story.
Mehta, on the other hand, explains how the city of his birth has changed over
time.
One reason why
“Indian writing in English” has come to seem antonymous to Midnight’s
Children is the novel’s central theme: partition. In the 31 years since its
publication, India has seen the birth of a new generation to which Singh’s
students belong. They never experienced the trauma of 1947 nor the excesses of
Indira Gandhi’s political power. The only bridge that lessens the gulf between
these Midnight’s Grandchildren and those years are history books. Another
reason why these students disconnect India from Midnight’s Children is
India itself. In his novel, India experiences authoritarian rule and fights
full-scale wars with Pakistan. The book portrays Indira Gandhi as the root
cause of all that plagues democracy in India and suggests that her departure
will ensure the country’s progress. Instead, we’ve made more peace with our
neighbor than wars and never experienced authoritarian rule. Indira is no
longer alive but her departure hasn’t reduced India’s deep social, political,
sectarian and regional fissures.
Midnight’s
Children, however, set a
frame for a future generation of Indian writers who chronicled the chasms of
India in their fiction and non-fiction works. Be it Kesavan or Adiga, Faleiro
or Mehta, they all write for India and of India. Their works condition the
English language to Indian sensibilities and reflect their own experience with
the country. Back in 1981, the novelist Clark Blaise wrote “Midnight’s
Children sounds like a continent finding its voice.” The last 31 years have
proved him right.
