Midnight's Children

(A book review written by me two years back for a website.Found it accidentally today......thanks to one of my seniors)
Midnight's Children,

Salman Rushdie

'I was born in the city of Bombay………………’ thus began Salman Rushdie and heralded himself onto a new golden page in the history of English literature. Thus began an occult tale which narrated history and in turn became a history by itself. Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece ‘Midnight’s Children’ is indeed the unfathomably flabbergasting work of a genius. Set in 20th century India the book depicts the various political changes taking place in the sub-continent prior to independence and post-independence. The book delineates sub-continental politics through the eyes of the protagonist Saleem Sinai who is indelibly linked to the fate of his motherland by virtue of his birth on the midnight of the 15th August 1947. When the whole nation savored the hard-earned moment of independence; when a soft-spoken Jawaharlal Nehru declared India’s new tryst with destiny, Saleem Sinai was born into the world with uncanny powers of telepathy and sniffing. And so started Saleem’s journey which changed with the changing political scenario in the Indian sub-continent. In fact Rushdie portrays Saleem as the democratic India which was born with unlimited dreams on that magical midnight , but which could not really be a perfect nation in the days to come. Some two decades from independence, the nation witnessed a day when Saleem’s son was born, a day when democracy gave birth to Emergency, a day when Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi curtailed the rights that Indians had been bestowed upon by independence. The book very much seems like an expression of Rushdie’s infuriation against the Emergency, the darkest consequence of independence and democracy in India. Of course the novel also focuses on other major political changes taking place in the sub-continent right from the Jallianwala Bagh massacre to the military rule in Pakistan and the liberation of Bangladesh. Written in Rushdie’s sublime style of writing, the plot races through places like Kashmir, Amritsar, Bombay, Delhi, Pakistan, Bangladesh and even the Sundarbans.

Who would like this book?

It is a book worth-reading for anyone who loves English literature.

Acclaim

Published in 1981 this book has been acclaimed worldwide and has touched the hearts of millions. It has provided the western world a sneak view of what the Indian sub-continent has been like in the mid of the 20th century. It won both the Man Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981. The book was later awarded the 'Booker of Bookers' Prize in 1993 as the best novel to be awarded the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. Midnight's Children is also the only Indian novel on Time magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels since its founding in 1923.

Reviewed by : Avinash Upadhyaya