Title: Midnight’s Children
Author: Salman Rushdie
Context: Midnight’s Children (1981) is a post colonial allegorical novel by Salman Rushdie. While modern India is represented by the thirty old Saleem Sinai who writes Midnight’s Children, his memoir, Shiva is destined to become not only the enemy of Saleem but also the most honored war hero of India. The fates of two children inevitably linked center around the historical story of modern India.
Synopsis: The story is about Saleem Sinai, one of the 1001 children born at the midnight hour. Each of the children born at this hour blessed with an extraordinary talent. They are both with a curse and privilege to be victims as well as master of their times. Saleem Sinai was born at midnight when India gained independence. By the coincidence, he found himself bewilderingly ‘handcuffed to history’. Saleem was born with gifts of a sense of smell that was wildly sensitive and an inner ear. The novel draws readers into a captivating story of a family set against a huge colorful background of India of the twentieth century.
Both the children were born in the very first hour on August 15, 1947, exactly at midnight when India gained independence from Great Britain. Both the boys were born in a hospital in Mumbai, however a nurse switches the babies. Saleem Sinai is the illegitimate son of a departing colonist from Britain and a Hindu woman belonging to a lower caste. The other child named Shiva is the son of a Muslim couple and is given to a poor street performer belonging to Hindu caste. He had an unfaithful wife who had passed away.
Other works by the Author:
Novels
1975 – Grimus
1983 – Shame
1988 – The Satanic Verses
1995 – The Moor’s Last Sigh
1999 – The Ground Beneath Her Feet
2001 – Fury
2005 – Shalimar the Clown
2008 – The Enchantress of Florence
2015 – Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
2017 – The Golden House
2019 – Quichotte
Collections
1994 – East, West
1947 – 1997 – Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing
2008 – The Best American Short Stories
Children’s Books
1990 – Haroun and the Sea of Stories
2010 – Luka and the Fire of Life
Essay and nonfiction
1987 – The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey
1981-1991 – Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism
1992 – The Wizard of Oz: BFI Film Classics
1998 – Mohandas Gandhi
1999 – Imagine There is No Heaven
1992- 2002 – Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction
2004 – The East Is Blue
2009 – A fine pickle
2012 – In the South
2012 – Joseph Anton: A Memoir