ABOUT THE NOVELIST
Salman Rushdie, born on 19th June 1947, is an Indian born British-American novelist and essayist. He was
born into a Kashmiri-Muslim family to Anit Ahmed Rushdie and Negin Bhatt.
He was born and educated in Bombay in St. Cathedral until he was fourteen.
Soon after that age he left the city of Bombay for England to study at Rugby School.
And it was during this time when he tasted the bitter experience of racism with comments such as
“Wogs go home” from one of the boys at Rugby.
So hurt by the experience that Rushdie never wanted to return to England. However, persuaded by his
parents he joined King’s College in Cambridge and returned to England to study for his graduation.
After graduation, he worked as a stage actor and also as a copywriter in an advertising firm.
It was also
the time when he was giving some serious thoughts of becoming a writer.
As a writer, Rushdie’s work reflects a combination of magical realism with historical fiction.
In addition to this, his work also has the many connections, disruptions, migration between the
civilization of east and west as its primary concern with the setting of the novel invariably being set on
the Indian subcontinent.
He is also to start the trend of Bombay novels in Indian English fiction by having the city as a major
setting in his novel Midnight’s Children. After Rushdie’s setting up of the trend a number of other Indian
English novels followed the same trend of Bombay novels by making the city as a major setting.
IMPORTANT WORKS
In his prolific career as a writer Rushdie has produced a plethora of great works in the form of fiction,
non fiction, children’s book, collection of essays, travelogue and so on.
However, for him to taste the success as a writer didn’t come at the very first attempt of his career
which is very much evident with the unsuccessful Grimus (1979).
Grimus, being his first novel was subject to both critical and commercial failure.
Despite the initial failure, Rushdie didn’t give up and come up with, what has been termed as his
“magnum opus”, Midnight’s Children (1981).
The novel was an instant success, both as critical and commercial which has made Rushdie an overnight
celebrity and a household name among other novelist.
Midnight’s Children has also bestowed upon him the prestigious Booker’s Prize in the same year. Not
only that but it also garnered Rushdie the award of “Booker of Booker Prize” twice, commemorating the
25th and 40th anniversary of the Booker prize respectively.
Another novel of Rushdie of equal fame but for all the wrong reasons was “The Satanic Verses” (1988). It
is known to be the most controversial novel of Rushdie till date.
The book has been banned in India due to hurting of the religious sentiments of the Muslim community which resulted in many riots and killings
in Bombay’s Bhendi Bazar.
Other countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, South Africa and in countries with large Muslim
populations has also put restrictions to the selling of the novel.
However, the biggest controversy related to the novel being the announcement of the “Fatwa” against
Rushdie on 14th February 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran.
This made Rushdie go
into hiding for decades until it was officially called off in the year of 2000.
During this hideout, Rushdie used the pseudonym of “Joseph Anton” to exist.
Apart from these Rushdie’s other works includes :
Novels
• Shame (1983)
• The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)
• The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)
Short stories
• East West (1994)
Children’s Fiction
• Haroun and The Sea Of Stories (1990)
Travelogue
• The Jaguar Smile (1987)
STRUCTURE OF MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
Stories Within Stories
The first thing in describing the structure of Midnight’s Children that comes to the mind of anyone who
would read is the similarity of the novel’s structure to that of a Chinese box.
Stories within stories is another way to put the structure in words.
Famous tales such as Panchatantra, Kathasaritsagar, Arabian Nights all have the similar structure or
should it be said that Rushdie borrowed this style from these famous collection of tales.
Like the frame tale of these epics, which is about how the various stories are came to be written,
Midnight’s Children is also about a novel of Saleem Sinai and his struggles in the form of various stories
as he put his novel together.
Non conformity to the conventional structure of the novel
Writing a novel has a specific structure. It must have a beginning, a middle and an end.
However, Rushdie showcases his expertise in writing while adhering to the norms of fiction by
announcing the birth of the hero.
But while you wait breathlessly to meet the protagonist Saleem Sinai
to be born on the midnight of 15th August 1947 , the garrulous narrator leads you astray with countless
interruptions, digressions and asides and you are made to listen many mazes of stories.
It tests the patience of the reader as Padma puts it :-
“You better get a move on or you’ll die before you get yourself born.”
However, this makes us in having an unmistakable delight in the embedded stories and this is exactly
the manner in which storytellers gets you to listen to the stories you did not set out to hear.
Rushdie borrowed this style of the beginning without ending form the 18th century novelist Lawrence
Sterne whose novel “Tristram Shandy” has the exact structure as of Midnight’s Children.
An Unreliable Narrator
In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie makes the use of a first person narrator in the form of the novel’s
protagonist, Saleem Sinai.
This made him very vulnerable to the criticism which are actually being made at the narrator as Rushdie
is blamed for all the mistakes, whether wittingly or otherwise, made by the narrator.
One such glaring mistake is the mistake of Valmiki/Vyass confusion which plagued Rushdie with many
flaks placed by the readers.
In the words of a reader aimed to excoriate Rushdie :-
“If you are going to use Hindu traditions in your story , ‘Mr. Rushdie’ , don’t you think you could take the
trouble to look them up?”
They were incensed by the irreverent use of Hindu traditions not realising that it was a deliberate
mistake made by Rushdie as part of his narrative strategy.
Rushdie explained all the mistakes he deliberately made in the novel including getting his dates and
statistics wrong.
While he owned up to some of the unintentionally made errors in the novel, he warned the reader that
Saleem Sinai is an unreliable narrator and that Midnight’s Children is far from being an authoritative
guide to the history of post-independent India.
The Juxtaposition of Fantasy and Realism
On defining fantasy, Eric Rabkin has said that,
“Fantasy is a genre in which the protagonist displays a hesitation in the presence of the supernatural.”
“Alice in the Wonderland” being one of the best examples of fantasy.
However, Rushdie follows the tenets of the village world view best exposed in Gracia Marquez’s “One
Hundred Years of Solitude”.
This village world view can be seen in characters like Padma and Mary Pereira and these characters are
essential in the successful implementation of fantasy because we need characters like these to make the
marvelous real.
Rushdie makes a juxtaposition of making his protagonist Saleem skeptical towards the supernatural,
however, this skepticism does not make him immune to the uncanny mysteries of the marvelous.
The only difference between characters like Saleem and Padma with regard to the idea of supernatural
is while the former swallows it at once without hesitation the later makes philosophical argument to
justify it.
The whole idea of Saleem’s argument to justify the existence of supernatural despite being skeptical is :-
“Reality can have metaphorical content, that does not make it less real.”
In Midnight’s Children , the postmodern skepticism has equal out with the pre modern belief through
the brilliant use of characters like Saleem and Padma.
Though, Rushdie parodies the “miracle seeking” pre modern, he does not cease to have affection for
them.
Conclusion
With the use of so many strategies in the structure of the novel, Midnight’s Children, Rushdie proved
not only the intricacies of the novel’s structure which makes it hard to comprehend but also how
efficient a writer he is in executing the same.
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