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
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
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.
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Last updated March 16, 2021