'Midnight's Children' Novel By Salman Rushdie : Brief Question-Answer Series & Discussion

Introduction : This blog is written as a part of the Thinking Activity assigned by Professor Dr Dilip Barad regarding Sir Salman Rushdie's novel 'Midnight's Children' published in 1981. The film-screening of the movie with the same title of the novel directed by Deepa Mehta was done in the department of English - MKBU.

Here in this blog I will be rendering some illustration as the response to few questions asked in the activity.

Questions & Answers :

(1) Narrative Technique & Difference in Film and the Novel :

While the novel is magic realism in genre, the film adaptation is a realistic, almost exact transposition of the novel into screen. Author Salman Rushdie asserts his authority in condensing 533 pages into 148 minutes of screen time, offering us a concise rendition of an epic story spanning four generations. “It was an exercise in discovering the essence of the book,” Rushdie said in an interview on CBC radio.

The audience has much to gain not only from Rushdie adapting his own work, but also from his voiceover narration. This is especially beneficial for those who have not read the novel. Here, the narrator is speaking directly to the viewers, and not like the book narrator Saleem telling his story to Padma as the reader eavesdrops. Rushdie’s narration strings together time, places, events, emotions and nuances into coherence.

Mehta has proficiently brought the story to screen with relatively fast pacing, engaging us with a kaleidoscope of sights and sounds as we zip past sixty years of India’s history. From Kashmir in 1917 to Bombay 1977, it brings us through the ending of British rule, the birth of a nation, the Partition of India and Pakistan, later the war of independence of Bangladesh, and finally, the Emergency under the government of Indira Gandhi.

Amidst the torrents of history emerges the main character Saleem Sinai. The film begins with his grandfather Dr. Aziz (Rajat Kapoor) in Kashmir, examining his patient and future wife Naseem (Shabana Azmi) through a perforated sheet. Humour adds to the enjoyment of seeing the scene visualized. (Source)

(2) Characters : Inclusion & Exclusion :

Aadam and Naseem have comparatively become smaller characters in the movie. Thus, Tai turns into a character of an unrecognisable youth in the movie and the episode of Naseem’s breaking of silence after a gap of three long years is omitted.

As Ahmed and Amina directly shift to Bombay, the part in which Amina saves Lifafa from being killed by the mob and Lafifa’s cousin Shri Ramram Seth making mystic prophesies about Amina's son fail to get a place in the movie.

Even Saleem’s prowess in digging deep into people's minds evades in the motion format. In the movie,
Saleem has the power to get connected to the midnight's children only, and his power to get into anyone’s mind
is missing. Thus, Saleem’s one-sided love with Evie Burns as well as his attempt to push into Evie’s mind is
lost. Similarly, the episode of using his mental abilities to follow Amina around the town to discover her affair
with Nadir is replaced by a monotonous observation through overhearing.

The movie tries to keep Saleem’s image clear enough and therefore the scene in which Saleem sees his mom, Amina, masturbating; while reciting the name of a man who is not Saleem’s father, and Saleem having a glance of his mother’s butt while she is about to pee; is reduced to a scene where Saleem watches his mother being passionate and taking the name of her former lover.

Unlike the text where Saleem is hospitalised for a cut in his fingers, Saleem in the motion genre is
hospitalised soon after a teacher badly punishes him. Then after, in both the formats, Saleem’s parents discover
that Saleem is not their biological son.
The entire episode of Saleem being sent to live with his filmmaker uncle and movie-star aunt is replaced by the episode where Saleem is sent to his aunt, Emerald, whose husband, Zulfikar, is Pakistani Army’s one of the supreme officers. And unlike the text, Saleem becomes youth in Pakistan in the movie. Thus, instead of travelling to Pakistan with his family, Saleem reunites with them in Karachi. But, from his journey from childhood till youth, Saleem was alone, with no friends, except the friends of his mind – the midnight’s children. The irony remains that in the text, Saleem fails to connect with the midnight’s children while he was in Pakistan.

In Pakistan, Jamila becomes famous as a singer as in the original genre, but Ahmed fails to enjoy moderate success making bath linens in the movie.

The movie doesn’t agree to emancipate the feeling of incest in Saleem, like in the novel. Therefore, his love for Jamila and his unnecessary justification towards a love relationship between both of is erased from the motion format.

In the movie, Saleem undergoes a nasal surgery not because he gets a severe sinus infection, like in the novel, but just because Ahmed forcibly makes that happen. But similar to the text, Saleem realises that he has lost his power of telepathy, but in its place, he is endowed with a powerful sense of smell where he can even smell the perfume of new love. (Source)

(3) Themes & Symbols in the Film and the Novel : 

Deepa Mehta is making a movie, not a post-colonial or post-modern text. She emphasized that the idea was not to make a visual representation of the book but to make a film that "stands on its own, keeping the themes of the novel intact." Comparison between two different mediums is, however inevitable, in the end unfair. This was the final, unspoken verdict implicit in the graduate course Rushdie taught at Emory this year, called "Great Works of Fiction Made Into Great Films." (Source)

Still, Mr. Rushdie, who wrote the screenplay (and does the curiously flat voice-over), meets Ms. Mehta halfway. In wrestling his bursting-at-the-seams, sometimes wearying epic into movie-acceptable size, he has pared it of authorial quirks and compressed it, lopping off subplots and characters and flights of fancy. 

Their more compelling grotesqueries shorn or diminished, the characters march in a now-this, now-that way through history, from the early part of the 20th century to independence to the days after Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency in the ’70s, and dart around the subcontinent, from Kashmir to Agra to Bombay to West Pakistan to East Pakistan (soon to be Bangladesh). 

In any case, they take a back seat to Saleem and his family’s story. There are infants switched at birth — one rich, one poor — revelations about parenthood, amnesia, war, riots, sudden shifts in fortune and, most satisfyingly, a kind of mother-son reunion between Saleem and his ayah that would do a Bombay talkie proud. (Source)

(4) Texture of the Novel & the Film : 

Rushdie himself might endorse this view. He has stated in an interview that "writers like Mulk Raj Anand and Narayan have many more affinities to Indian writers in Indian languages than to a writer like [him] who happens to be writing in English." He adds that "Midnight's Children was partly conceived as an opportunity to break away from the manner in which India has been written about in English. There is a great deal of truth in Rushdie's assertion; but it is also necessary to qualify his view in fairness to the complexity of the lndo-Anglian literary tradition. By demonstrating that Midnight's Children fits neatly into an evolving literary tradition, one gives the novel a sense of perspective and a sharper focus. 

Whatever stylistic affinities Midnight's Children might have with postmodern fiction, it is important to remember that this novel contains an easily recognizable pattern of meaning and a sense of continuity. "Post-modernism." David Lodge quite rightly points out, "is suspicious of any kind of continuity."5 Midnight's Children explores, in its own idiosyncratic way, the varied and often paradoxical experience of modern India. 6 It affirms the relation between life and art not through its narrative mode but through its language which retains its referential quality. At a thematic level, one might say that the central preoccupation of the novel is with the idea of fragmentation. We see the fragmentation of India at various levels: on the social level there is the disintegration of the extended family of Saleem Sinai; on the cultural level we see the conflict between acquired and inherited values, experienced by Methwold, Aadam Aziz, the Brass Monkey and the convert Mary; in the realm of politics there is the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the non-violent struggle of Gandhi, the strife between the Muslims and the Hindus, the Partition, political intrigue in Pakistan, the creation of Bangladesh, and the events leading to the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi. The author sees divisive forces gradually encroaching into Indian life and culminating in the 1970s when there is a frightening degree of dislocation and fragmentation in social and political life. (Source)

(5) Aesthetic Experience after Watching the Film : 

These are the words that (the novel’s) Nehru writes in a letter to the newborn midnight child. Through this mirror construction Rushdie is able to use Saleem as a reflection of the whole of India, and the parallel is further strengthened by the similarity perceived by Saleem’s geography teacher Mr Zagallo between the physiognomy of the continent and Saleem’s grotesque face: “In the face of thees ugly ape you don’t see the whole map of India?”

The metropolis Bombay (Mumbai) sometimes functions as an intermediate step between the individual and the nation: “Our Bombay: it looks like a hand but it’s really a mouth, always open, always hungry, swallowing food and talent from everywhere else in India” (125–26). Here, Bombay is regarded as a microcosmic magnet that attracts elements from the great macrocosmic India.

Another fact that indicates Saleem’s representative role in regard to the Indian nation is his ability to function as a centre of consciousness for the thousand-and-one children who were born in the midnight hour after India’s independence. This magical talent underlines Saleem’s multi-centred identity and furthermore implies his synecdochal relationship to India. (Source)

Mehta beautifully depicts the scene in which the newborns are switched. In a colonial hospital, the Christian nurse, Mary Pereira, carries out the furtive act, hoping to right some wrongs in the world. But the significance of the switch can’t be that a rich kid grows up poor and a poor kid rich, as the nurse decides is just; surely Rushdie means to make the point that a Hindu boy grows up Muslim and a Muslim boy grows up Hindu, both loved by their parents, who don’t know the difference. The significance has to be that our identities are not intrinsic to us: they are roles we learn to play. (Source)

Conclusion : Like the novel, the film begins with the intimate exploits of Saleem’s progenitors: his grandfather’s comic doctor-patient romance with his grandmother in a paradisal Kashmir; his mother’s love affair with a cowardly poet; her unlikely marriage to his businessman father. The heart of the film lies in Saleem’s own unhappy family, but he nonetheless experiences a charmed childhood in a lush, tropical Bombay, where the wealthy Sinais occupy a magnificent villa in an era before building booms.

Twinning and mixed-up identities drive the plot of both the novel and film, as if behind Rushdie’s wizardry in recasting history as farce and myth lies a simple wish that Hindus and Muslims could be brothers — are brothers, interchangeable people. Saleem, raised by Muslim parents, is actually born to a poor Hindu woman, who dies in childbirth, and her street-singer husband. (But it’s intimated that the baby’s real father is a creepy, departing Englishman.) The actual Saleem Sinai, the one born Muslim, is raised by the impoverished street singer, who names him Shiva, after the Hindu god of destruction. (Source)

The Video on Why You Should Read 'Midnight's Children' :

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