25 years of Midnight’s Children

Reading Salman Rushdie’s non-fiction literature is always a treat. I cannot say the same for his fiction work although his Midnight’s Children still remains amongst my all time favorites. In the morning I got to read his interesting account of the evolution of this marvelous novel. His beginning of the essay is quite encyclopaedic:

It was the year that India became a nuclear power and 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. E. L. Doctorow published Ragtime that year, and David Mamet wrote American Buffalo, and Eugenio Montale won the Nobel Prize (for Literature). And just after my return from India, Indira Gandhi was convicted of election fraud, and one week after my 28th birthday she declared a state of emergency and assumed tyrannical powers. It was the beginning of a long period of darkness that would not end until 1977. I understood almost at once that Mrs G. had somehow become central to my still-tentative literary plans.

and also the end:

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.

If you haven’t read the novel (you definitely should), the story revolves around the 1001 children who were born exactly at 12:00 AM on August 15, 1947, and all these children were born with supernatural powers. Among them was the central character, Saleem Sinai with a prodigal nose that could smell events, or something I cannot recall. His story goes parallel to all the post-independence historical occurrences in India. The Indian government, aware of the collective power of such children, is out to eliminate them.
The best tragic part of the novel was the full circle life takes Saleem: from pauper to rich to pauper again. You need to read it to feel it.

I don’t have anything particular to write about the book actually, as I read it many years ago, and since then I’ve read Grimus, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and currently I’m reading Shalimar The Clown and they’ve taken their toll. I’ve liked none of them, especially after having read Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh. The passion that imbued my soul while reading these two books was starkly lacking in the other books. In fact I’ve been trying to read Shalimar The Clown for months now and I’ve found it so boring that I haven’t been able to go beyond a few pages. But I’m going to complete it. I think I’ll read whatever Rushdie writes because he wrote Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh. Personally for me, this puts him in the same category as Dostoyevsky, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Garcia. I try to read whatever these writers have written, whether I like it or not.