Midnight's Children: Thinking Activity

Midnight's Children 

This blog is a response to the thinking activity task assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this blog, I will share my view on the narrative technique of the novel and film adaptation, themes, symbols, and texture of Midnight's Children.

Salman Rushdie is one of the most recognized names in the literary world. He is most well known for his controversial 1988 novel, "The Satanic Verses." He has written over twenty-five books including Midnight's Children, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1981. The novel has been translated into over 40 languages.

Salman Rushdie's 1981 novel Midnight's Children is about India's journey from British colonial authority to independence and division. It is a postcolonial, postmodern, and magical realism narrative portrayed in the background of historical events by its main protagonist, Saleem Sinai. It is self-reflexive to preserve history through fictitious stories.

Midnight's Children is an epic story of independent India told from the perspective of Indian children born at the moment when India gained her independence from Britain. The novel follows Saleem Sinai, the narrator of the story, from his birth to his death as he lives through the impact of partition, war, and nuclear weapons. The novel is told in a non-chronological order, often times jumping through time, even within a single sentence. As a result, the reader can only understand the full picture of the story by connecting the different events and understanding the various themes and symbolism. The reader must analyze the themes and symbols of this novel. This novel is having magic realism as a background but it's not a completely fictional work, it's also a postcolonial and post-modern novel. the novel is telling many stories within stories in order to tell the truth of India's ruthless political reign.

Narrative Techniques:

In Midnight's Children, Rushdie employs the first-person narrative method. The novel's characters are introduced long before they appear in the novel. It builds suspense in the minds of the readers. The novel spans seventy-five years in the history of the Indian subcontinent. Saleem Sinai, the protagonist, tells the narrative of his birth and the beginning of the Indian subcontinent. The story blurs the chronological lines. Saleem Sinai, Rushdie's counterpart, relates his narrative from a distance of time and place. Like the Mahabharta narrator, Sanjay, who has the ability to see things from a distance and recounts the events of the Kurukshetra battle, Saleen has magical abilities that allow him to see from a distance and read the minds of readers.

The novel's narrative structure and the film adaptation, which has the same name as the novel, are completely different, and we never find it to be a significant concern when it comes to movies vs. novels as Rushdie contends,

 “that stories and films are different things, and that the source material must be modified, even radically modified, to be effective in the new medium” 

 The difference in narrative style between novels and movies is due to the fact that both are separate genres and a movie cannot contain all that a novel can, therefore writers prefer to improvise, but in this situation, the author of the novel and the scriptwriter of the movie are the same person. We don't expect many narrative twists when the author of the novel writes the screenplay. In the narrative, Saleem Sinai tells his experience to Padma Mangroli, his lover and, later, his fiancée. Padma takes on the role of the listener in the novel's storytelling framework.

Symbols in Midnight's Children:

Silver Spittoon:

Spittoons may be found throughout Midnight's Children. By revisiting the spittoon motif in numerous circumstances, Rushdie weaves significance into the picture and offers the reader with a reference point and familiar angle of insight into the meaning of his tale.

One particular spittoon, an extraordinary silver spittoon inlaid with lapis lazuli, appears at the beginning of the story at the Rani of Cooch Naheen's house and follows the course of the narrative almost until the end, where it is eventually buried under the rubble of civic reconstruction by a bulldozer. Rushdie's persona At various points in the novel, Saleem comments on the significance of the spittoon, yet spittoons take on broader and more hazy significance in other portions. For Saleem, the silver spittoon serves as a link to reality. When Parvati-the-Witch has dematerialized Saleem, she says the following:

"What I held on to in that ghostly time-and-space: a silver spittoon. Which, transformed like myself by Parvati-whispered words, was nevertheless a reminder of the outside . . . clutching finely-wrought silver, which glittered even in that nameless dark, I survived. Despite head-to-toe numbness, I was saved, perhaps, by the glints of my precious souvenir."

and near the end of the book, at the event of the spittoon's loss:

"I lost something else that day, besides my freedom: bulldozers swallowed a silver spittoon. Deprived of the last object connecting me to my more tangible, historically verifiable past, I was taken to Benares to face the consequences of my inner, midnight-given life." 

 These two quotations show that the spittoon means the same thing to Saleem as it does to the reader. It's a welcome home, a charming but basic reminder of reality in a world that attempts to overwhelm with the sheer volume and variety of its voices and experiences. Saleem is subjected to the voices of a thousand and one Midnight's Children, which threaten to drown out his sense of himself as an individual human, as well as the numerous physical and psychological beatings inflicted on him throughout his life; the reader is similarly assaulted by Rushdie's novel's overwhelming density and pace.