Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

 

Midnight's Children

(1981)

 

Salman Rushdie

(June 19, 1947 – )

 

Notes

First published in England by Jonathan Cape in April 1981.


 


  
Introduction
 
In 1975 I published my first novel, Grimus, and decided to use the £700 advance to travel in India as cheaply as possible for as long as I could make the money last, and on that journey of fifteen-hour bus rides and humble hostelries Midnight’s Children was born. It was the year that Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party and Sheikh Mujib, the founder of Bangladesh, was murdered; when the Baader-Meinhof gang was on trial in Stuttgart and Bill Clinton married Hillary Rodham and the last Americans were evacuated from Saigon and Generalissimo Franco died. In Cambodia it was the Khmer Rouge’s bloody Year Zero.
[...]
I had wanted for some time to write a novel of childhood, arising from my memories of my own childhood in Bombay. Now, having drunk deeply from the well of India, I conceived a more ambitious plan. I remembered a minor character named Saleem Sinai, born at the midnight moment of Indian independence, who had appeared in an abandoned draft of a stillborn novel called The Antagonist. As I placed Saleem at the center of my new scheme I understood that his time of birth would oblige me immensely to increase the size of my canvas. If he and India were to be paired, I would need to tell the story of both twins. Then Saleem, ever a striver for meaning, suggested to me that the whole of modern Indian history happened as it did because of him; that history, the life of his nation-twin, was somehow all his fault. With that immodest proposal, the novel’s characteristic tone of voice—comically assertive, unrelentingly garrulous, and with, I hope, a growing pathos in its narrator’s increasingly tragic overclaiming—came into being. I even made the boy and the country identical twins.
[...]
I have written and spoken elsewhere about my debt to the oral narrative traditions of India, and also to those great Indian novelists Jane Austen and Charles Dickens—Austen for her portraits of brilliant women caged by the social convention of their time, women whose Indian counterparts I knew well; Dickens for his great, rotting, Bombay-like city, and his ability to root his larger-than-life characters and surrealist imagery in a sharply observed, almost hyperrealistic background, out of which the comic and fantastic elements of his work seem to grow organically, becoming intensifications of, and not escapes from, the real world. I have probably said enough, too, about my interest in creating a literary idiolect that allowed the rhythms and thought patterns of Indian languages to blend with the idiosyncrasies of “Hinglish” and “Bambaiyya,” the polyglot street slang of Bombay. The novel’s interest in the slippages and distortions of memory will also, I think, be evident enough to the reader.
[...]
I reached the end of Midnight’s Children in mid-1979 and sent it to my friend and editor Liz Calder at Jonathan Cape. I afterward learned that the first reader’s report had been brief and forbiddingly negative: “The author should concentrate on short stories until he has mastered the novel form.” Liz asked for a second report, and this time I was luckier, because the second reader, Susannah Clapp, was enthusiastic; as, after her, was another eminent publishing figure, the editor Catherine Carver. Liz bought the book, and soon afterward so did Bob Gottlieb at Alfred A. Knopf.
[...]
In the West people tended to read Midnight’s Children as a fantasy, while in India people thought of it as pretty realistic, almost a history book.
[...]
In 1981, Margaret Thatcher was British prime minister, the American hostages in Iran were released, President Reagan was shot and wounded, there were race riots across Britain, the Pope was shot and wounded, Picasso’s Guernica went back to Spain, and President Sadat of Egypt was assassinated. It was the year of V. S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers and Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise and John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich. Like all novels, Midnight’s Children is a product of its moment in history, touched and shaped by its time in ways that its author cannot wholly know. [...]

 

—Salman Rushdie, Introduction, Midnight's Children, 25th anniv. ed., Penguin Random House, 2005.

 

   

 

Comprehension Check


The Perforated Sheet

  • Who is Scheherazade (9)?

  • What does "open-sesame" allude to (10)?

Mercurochrome

  • What does Aadam Aziz mean when he says "move...like a woman" (33)?
  • What is mercurochrome?
  • What is the "noise like teeth chattering in winter" (36)?

            

    

 

Study Questions

  • Discuss the use of "once upon a time" at the opening of the story. Why is it inadequate ("No, that won't do" 9)? In what way is it fantastic and in what way does it deny fantasy?

  • How is Rushdie's ethnic first person narrator of Midnight's Children the same or different from Kipling's in "A Sahib's War"?

  • Word play
    • In a paragraph about limited time and the urgency of having meaning, explain Saleem Sinai's curious statement: "I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity" (9).
    • What is the significance of characters' names? Why does Saleem begin his history with Aadam? Why is the landowner named Ghani? Consider also the etymology meaning of the names Saleem Sinai, Padma, and others.
    • How does the diction affect the connotation of holes? When is the meaning positive, negative, ambivalent, absurd or mocking?
    • What synonyms, euphemisms or metaphors are used for the nose and what effect do they have?

  • Repeated variations: The narrative of Midnight's Children features frequent repetitions. The same scene or incident is recast multiple times in a different way. What does this achieve? Consider some of the following instances.

    • What is the difference between "a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven inches in diameter cut into the centre" and "that holey, mutilated square of linen, which is my talisman, my open-sesame" (9–10)?
    • How does the sequence of prayer variations develop?
      • "One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man." (10)
      • "(The tussock of earth, crucial though its presence was as it crouched under a chance wrinkle of the prayer-mat, was at bottom no more than a catalyst.)" (11)
      • "On the morning when the valley, gloved in a prayer-mat, punched him on the nose" (11)
      • "Forward he bent, and the earth, prayer-mat-covered, curved up towards him. And now it was the tussock's time. At one and the same time a rebuke from Ilse-Oskar-Ingrid-Heidelberg as well as valley-and-God, it smote him upon the point of the nose. Three drops fell. There were rubies and diamonds. And my grandfather, lurching upright, made a resolve. Stood. Rolled cheroot. Stared across the lake. And was knocked forever into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alternation: a hole." (12)
  • What is the role of the ancient boatman Tai?
  • Why is Padma a necessary addition to the narrative?
  • What is the function of inanimate objects in the story? How does Rushdie use non-human elements and sensory motifs? Consider, for instance,
    • The perforated sheet
    • The tussock
    • Mercurochrome
    • The lake
    • The stethoscope
    • The doctor's bag
    • Smells
    • Itching
  • How do the allusions and extra-textual references set up the narrative for later developments?
  • Consider the narrator's urgent versus dismissive interjections. Which situations prompt persistence ("Oh, spell it out, spell it out" 9) and which meet dismissal ("No matter" 36)?

            

 
  

 

Vocabulary

plot
character
point of view
diction; denotation, connotation
double entendre
imagery
irony
first person narrator
prior text(s)
orality
logic
linearity; nonlinearity
digression
self-reflexivity
parallels
multiculturalism
plausibility
history
metaphor
symbol, symbolism
time
identity
history
Westernization
tradition
violence
satire
birth
death
life
meaning; meaning making; myth making
storytelling

 

Review Sheet

Characters

Saleem Sinai – "I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history [...] I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate" (9); "My own hand, I confess, has begun to wobble; not entirely because of its theme, but because I have noticed a thin crack, like a hair, appearing in my wrist, beneath the skin" (36)

Padma – "our plump Padma—is sulking magnificently" (24); "She stirs a bubbling vat all day for a living; something hot and vinegary has steamed her up tonight. Thick of waist, somewhat hairy of forearm" (24)

Aadam Aziz – "One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray." (10); "he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man. This decision, however, made a hole in him" (10); "The young, newly-qualified Doctor Aadam Aziz" (12)

Tai – "the old boatman, Tai" (12)

Ghani – "Ghani the landowner" (18); "He wears thick dark glasses and his famous poisonous smile, and discusses art" (18)

Naseem Ghani – "the landowner’s daughter Naseem Ghani contracted a quite extraordinary number of minor illnesses" (24); "'Nowhere on earth,' he said, and began to shake in her arms" (36)

Ilse Lubin – "'I’m in love,' Aadam Aziz said to Ilse Lubin" (29); "after the body, bloated, wrapped in weeds, had been dredged up by a group of blank-faced boatmen" (30)
Brigadier R. E. Dyer – "He is the Martial Law Commander of Amritsar" (36)


 

Places 

Bombay – "I was born in the city of Bombay" (9)

Kashmir – "One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose" (10)
Amritsar – "It is April 7th, 1919, and in Amritsar the Mahatma’s grand design is being distorted" (34)


 

Time 

August 15, 1947 – 

    Midnight – "I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more … On the stroke of midnight" (9)

 

 

 


Sample Student Responses to Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Response 1: 

 

           

 

 

Reference



 

Links

 

Salman Rushdie

 

 

 

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children. 1981. Picador, 1982.

 


Further Reading

Rushdie, Salman. East, West. Vintage, 1995.


Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. Penguin Books, 1992.


 



 

Home  |  Literary Terms  |  English Help  

Last updated March 16, 2021