Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: Re-visiting India’s Past

Abstract

This paper explores how Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980) re-visits the political history of post-independence from the British Empire in 1947 including significant moments such as the Partition of Pakistan and India and Indira Gandhi’s state of Emergency.  What is significant in the literary text is Rushdie’s ability to fictionalise history, fantasize his depiction of historical reality and combine history with politics through the portrayal of the individual, Saleem Sinai the narrator, about the larger historical context that fashions the Indian society. Midnight’s Children creates a history of India that is extremely heterogeneous and diverse, replete with stories, images and ideas- a multifarious hybrid history.  By revisiting the past of India, and re-writing one’s own history, one which allows for the infinite variety of experiences, cultures and perspectives that make up our world, Rushdie’s novel clears up a place in the historical record for those the suppressed and the silent voices of history.