Midnight's Children

My very yellowed and battered copy of ‘Midnight’s Children’ still sits on my bookshelf where it has sat for the past 25 years. I read it when I first went to India, back in 1987 as essential reading for 21 year old backpackers in those days. It, and India, opened up new worlds for me – worlds beyond European Judeo-Christian ordered society, where human life and death, wealth and extreme poverty were lived out on the street, not sanitised by European industrial bureaucracy.

Reading the testimonials on the back cover of my 1982 edition makes you realise just how far Europe and India have come in the past 30 years. It marked Salman Rushdie as a major novelist as the voice of the ‘other’, of the ‘orient’ to start to make itself heard on its own terms in the English speaking world. ‘The literary map of India is about to be redrawn….Midnight’s Children sounds like a continent finding its voice. An author to welcome to world company’ as the New York Times proclaims on the front cover.

The story starts with the birth of independent India, as an exhausted Britain finally took its leave, and the birth of 2 boys at midnight on 14/15 August 1947. One born to a wealthy family, the other to a poor family, eeking out an existence begging for coins in exchange for a song on an accordion. But in some sort of private revolutionary act, the midwife looking after them, Mary Pereira, swaps them - denying the riches due to one, condemning him to a life of poverty (and no mother, as his mother died shortly after the birth) and the other to unexpected wealth.

And so the 2 boys are linked not only to each other but to all the other children born at midnight, at the birth of India. As Rushdie put it, ‘….all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents – the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history’ (p.118). Saleem Sinai (the now rich boy, played by Satya Bhabha) discovers a shared telepathy in which all the children of midnight, can be conjured up for their very own conference. This included Shiva, the boy whose life he stole and Parvati- the witch with magical powers.

Trying to convey the sweep of history the book covers on screen in less than 2½ hours is difficult and not altogether satisfactory. I don’t know how much the film would have made sense without a prior knowledge of modern history of the Indian sub-continent. Rushdie’s forte lies with weaving together the personal lives of Saleem, Shiva and their families with the political events as the newly born India goes through its own growing pains – through partition and the creation of Pakistan, war in Kashmir, the war with East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh, to Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency, forced sterilisations and the military coup in Pakistan. I was slightly confused with the character of General Zulfikar Ali (played by Rahul Bose) in the film, the army general husband of Emerald Aunty, Saleem’s aunt. In the film, he seemed to be modelled, both in appearance and role, on General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq – the army general who deposed Pakistan's Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in a military coup in 1977 (and subsequently had him executed on trumped up murder charges). The swapping of names in the book / film may have been deliberate, though Indira Gandhi had her own name in the film.

There seemed to be some kind of divine fate as Shiva becomes a much respected and decorated soldier following the war with Bangladesh whereas Saleem is reduced to poverty after losing all his family, killed by a bomb on the house. Saleem then marries Parvati-the-witch who is pregnant with Shiva’s child, who he vows to bring up as his own child.

The religious intermingling throughout the film (and book) is sobering, particularly in the light of subsequent world events and Iran’s ‘fatwa’ on Rushdie following the ‘Satanic Verses’. Shiva is born to a (presumably) Hindu mother, fathered by an English colonial, whilst Saleem is Muslim – both swapped at birth by a Christian midwife. Saleem then subsequently marries Hindu Parvati. The film itself was shot in Sri Lanka, as director Deepa Mehta feared protests by both Muslim fundamentalists if shot in Pakistan and Hindu fundamentalists if shot in India. As it was, even in Sri Lanka, filming was temporarily stopped following a complaint from Iran. After the film’s Indian premiere in December 2012, the Indian National Congress complained about the negative portrayal of Indira Gandhi and screenings were stopped – though apparently due to start again next month.

I found the ending poignant, as Saleem makes his way to Bombay and finds Mary Pereira now running a chutney factory. After the idealism and hope of India’s birth, the turbulence and wars of adolescence, Saleem, his son Aadam Sinai (Shiva’s biological son), Sikh father figure Picture Singh and Mary find themselves bonded to each other, connected through circumstance and events that have survived any family or religious ties. They have attained a hard-won maturity, appreciative of the depth and simplicity of human bonds as Saleem embarks on true adulthood, now responsible for his son.

An image that may resonate with many of us, as we reflect back on our own paths and growing pains over the last 30 years. And hopefully one that will now allow India to fully take its place on the world stage, on its own terms.