Midnight's Children: India’s contemporary Mahabharata

Book author: Salman Rushdie

Review from Anjum

India’s contemporary Mahabharata and a wild mix of magical realism and mythology. In this book, which is its own genre, Rushdie pickled the 30 years of India after its independence from the British.

I was reading First Darling of the Morning, Thrity Umrigar’s memoir. Just near the end, she mentions that she received this book “Midnight’s Children” as a gift from Jesse and finished it very quickly. I loved reading her memoir and I became a fan of Jesse. So I thought it’s time I read my copy of Midnight’s Children that’s been displayed and untouched in the top shelf of my study for a while. Well, what a recommendation from Jesse!

I heard about this book a long time ago. It was on my reading list, but I kept stalling. I wasn’t sure if this would be a boring-classic or classic-classic for my taste. Funny, I thought the book would be about poor homeless children in India (that’s why the Children in the name) and I was not so cheerful to pick up a book that would unleash tragic events and make me feel sorry. I was wrong.

After reading about 50 pages, I googled if this is a Booker prize winner (my bad, it is mentioned in my copy), you know Booker winners have a special quality that I felt in this book. This is a Booker winner and what more I found was- the book belongs to the magical realism genre. What? I was very afraid of this genre, reading only one book and skimming through another. I think this genre unleashes its power and charm when you know the background on the theme it’s been written on. For example, I could not connect to One Hundred Years of Solitude, maybe because we do not share common history and culture with Colombia.

But this is magical realism, even though it sounds no less than realism. Characters are named by their traits and the author didn't feel obliged to name them otherwise. The snake doctor is called Saarpistiker (Saarp meaning snake). Author’s younger sister had not got any name, for half of the book, she was mentioned as “The brass monkey”. We see the most charming man, the dung lotus… be it a character name or a story- magical realism at its best.

In this book, in the post-independence India, Saleem Sinai, in the first person tells the reader about his birth, which is parallel to India’s birth as well. Saleem’s grandfather is from Kashmir who developed a void in his soul after he hit ruby and diamond in his prayer mat on a cold Kashmiri morning. From there the story begins. Saleem’s parents met in the heat of Delhi and Saleem is born in a two-stories hospital in Bombay. The Bombay childhood, the exile that came after Alpha and Omega and more stories... Saleem is also telling the story to Padma, whom he calls the dung-lotus. The story develops and we see Saleem’s life gets more and more tangled with the events of India and its neighbors. A bit like Forrest Gump.

One notable trait of the book is- like movies of present days where two three timelines run side by side (think in Oppenheimer), Rushdie presented multiple locations or multiple timelines run simultaneously at the same chapter. Here he is talking about the reverend mother (her strict grandmother, whatsitsname), next the political agenda of the Muslim League and back to the reverend mother.

Some very historically important turns of events appear in this book. Saleem tells us about Mian Abdullah, the hummingbird. The 1965 India-Pakistan war comes in the book. And of course the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh. It was interesting to get a view of this matter outside of history textbooks and from the eyes of a neighbor. An interesting observation- for all my primary school life, I memorized Ziaur Rahman declaring the independence of Bangladesh, until the Awami League government was elected to govern. Textbooks and history, like governments, keep changing here. Rushdie in his fiction could write that it was Mujib who declared independence and in Bangladesh we kept memorizing otherwise. Sometimes, fiction tells us more truth, no?

I was talking about Mahabharata. And take the characters- Shiva and Parvati. How Rushdie created the characters, loaned the Mahabharata and the Indian epic resurrected in the post-independence depiction of Rushdie.

And how Rushdie was fearless! (this I find in Arundhati Roy as well). He criticized the Emergency period of India enforced by Indira. He writes,

Indira is India, India is Indira

Saleem Sinai, the birthday-mate of India, feels compelled to risk his life to save India from the Indira, the Madam, the Widow.

He describes the son of the prime minister as Labia-lips, LOL. And how all the supporters of Labia-Lips look alike.

He gives us a glimpse of the other side of “Garibi Hathao” campaign.

In a sense Saleem Sinai, the birthday mate of India, resembled India herself. Like a land is an entity composed of its individuals, I found Saleem composed of so many traits. So many traits in a single individual, one individual conflicted by its own many different traits, like India?

Through the tv series of Netflix, “bhenchod” is probably the most spoken word in India (LOL). And take Saleem, resembling every good and bad thing of India, and we find him literally as a bhenchod…

I can keep going and going. But the fact is- I seriously need to sleep now. My love for this book can’t be written in an hour, and more than an hour has passed. So many pages are bookmarked, it would take a whole night’s sleep to express how deeply the writing crossed my mind. Recently I visited my childhood home after good ten years, where we used to rent an apartment during my whole school life. Rushdie compared to a similar feeling with his words, that Bombay, the town of Mumbadevi has changed so much, where is the Kolynos toothpaste billboard that used to cross baby Saleem’s path everyday, the familiar sweet shop, what are these voids and where is the childhood gone? You see, the book is not limited to history.

Midnight’s Children  might not suit your taste. But if this gets you, it gets you hard. You are gonna come back, re-read. And like pickles, the taste would get more dimension! I am definitely adding it to my re-read list, for a vacation where I will revisit my favorite place. And over cups of tea, will taste this delicacy of Rushdie. Oh, can’t wait…