Salman Rushdie writes in Midnight’s Children : The monster in the streets has begun to roar, while in Delhi a wiry man is saying,’...At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India awakens to life and freedom...”. Simultaneously, in the book, in a clinic in Bombay Dr. Narlikar informs Ahmed Sinai of the birth of his son, Saleem, “ at the stroke of midnight.” Later Jawharlal Nehru writes to the new born, ‘Dear Baby Saleem...you are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India that is eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention, it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.”
Seventy years later as India celebrates hard-earned freedom from 200 years of subjugation from colonial rule, the Saleem Sinais of the country, along with the rest of the multitude, have enjoyed the fruits of a democracy their parents and grandparents fought for To mark the anniversary of this seminal moment in history BBC Radio 4 is set to host a reading of Rushdie’s iconic book on August 15. .
Former bureaucrat and author of historical fiction NS Madhavan says, “While the children born on August 15, 1947 have grown old, the nation is still young When Chou En Lai was asked about the French Revolution, he said it was too early to comment on an event that happened just 200 years ago,”implying that the country at 70 is still taking formative steps. Looking at the fates of nations Madhavan says that the Soviet Union disappeared in a span of 70 years and hence this is too short a span for a country.
He read the novel first when it came out in 1981, recalling it to be “unputdownable,”and later in 1998
when its initial exuberance had receded but its magical realism continued to thrill.
“The book was a turning point in Indian literature. All the big names Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh and many others came after Rushdie. The world started taking notice of Indian literature. We had Mulk Raj Anand, RK Laxman, Raja Rao, who were all writing as if in a foreign tongue. Rushdie changed that completely. The magic was that you were able to catch up with contemporary India,”says Madhavan.
Writer Anees Salim recommends Midnight’s Children for two reasons. He says, “First, it changed the way readers and writers look at Indian literature. Second, we could finally experience magic realism without the intervention of a translator.” Had it not been for the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, he would not have read Salman Rushdie so early in his life. He was about 19 and found the novel in his home library. “I dreaded the possibility of it being too cerebral for me, but found myself instantly engrossed in it. Until then I had believed magic realism was something only Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his ilk could master. And here was an Indian novel that erased the line between historical events and historical fiction, that chronicled the history of Indian subcontinent in an impressively irreverent voice.”
But Salim’s awe for the book was countered by some pointed critique from his father who asked him to read The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass.
“ To my father, the protagonists of these books, Oskar Matzerath and Saleem Sinai, kept reminding him of each other. While the former was born on the day the Nazis came to power, the latter was delivered on the night India won freedom. When I read Midnight’s .. I found shades of Oskar Matzerath in Saleem Sinai’s life but I kept recommending Midnight’s Children.”
The one shared sentiment, across board,- writers, readers, teachers filmmakers- across on the the book and the country, except for the birth of Saleem Sinai, is of the magnitude of the book, the sweeping canvas that captures the diversity of the country. “The charm really lies there, in the storytelling of the country’s diversity,” says Priya TM, who is re-reading the book.
Author of historical novel, Without a City Wall ,”Thomas Chacko reiterates the view of the book’s wide bandwidth. He says, “ Midnight's .. , covering as it does almost half the years since the birth of the Indian nation, has almost everything and everyone in it - from the Partition, religious divisions, linguistic fights and slums to the Emergency and from eccentric aunts and cousins to soldiers and snake charmers.
“This epic book presents an India very different from the Fosterian view of India and perhaps a truer picture of the land and its people. Rushdie's timing is, as always, bang on. On August 15, 2017 Saleem Sinai and the other Midnight's Children will attain the Biblical lifespan of three score years and ten.”
“When you sing 'happy birthday' to India, with its past baggage and its current torpor, here is a book that bares some tics of the world’s largest democracy,” says Shinie Antony, writer, adding that Salman Rushdie is an apt choice, not just as an author but as also someone born in 1947. Saleem, like Salman was born that year too, but more bang on dot. Apart from the technical categories Midnight's Children manages to straddle - magic realism, post-modern, post-colonial - it is the relatable intuitions it brings to the Partition that maintain its posterity.”
“It is any literature student’s dream to encounter such a book,” gushes Priya K. Nair, Assistant Professor, Department of English, St. Teresas’s College. She was fascinated by the book when she first read it in the early 90s. “Saleem Sinai is a metaphor of the history of India, the partition and its pluralism,”she says.
According to her Rushdie’ deft storytelling is in the use of magical realism, combing the real with the unreal, something that Indians are used to from their familiarity with the Indian epics.
Priya adds that magical realism is a literary device, used by writers as a mode of resistance against authoritarian regimes. It has political overtones. She also points to the inimitable language used, which Rushide aptly calls “chutnification.”.
“Rushdie has decolonised English and claimed it as our own,”she says.
Much as Shipra Cleetus enjoyed the book she finds that as historical fiction it does keep away from some prominent struggles of the freedom movement. “It’s real charm lies in Rushdie's masterful skill in creating a world that hinges between the real and unreal.
Priya Nair finds this world still very relevant. “In the present context we see ourselves as part of the history that unfurled on August 15. We are part of that pluralism.”
Madhavan says, “the idea off India is still evolving. India has core strength in its constitution. If that is left undisturbed it can take a lot of diversity and treat people as equal, even later than its 70 years .
And of Saleem Sinai after Emergency, writes Rushide: “Änd Saleem? No longer connected to history, drained above and below, I made my way back to the capital, conscious that an age, which had begun on that long ago midnight, had come to a sort of an end.”
