April 19, 1981
A Novel of India's Coming of Age
By CLARK BLAISE
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MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN
By Salman Rushdie.
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he literary map of India is about to be redrawn. The familiar outline - E.M. Forster's outline
essentially - will always be there, because India will always offer the dualities essential for the
Forsterian vision: the open sewer and the whispering glade, Mother Theresa and the Taj Mahal.
Serious English-language novelists from India (often called Indo-Anglians), or those from abroad who
use Indian material, have steered a steady course between these two vast, mutually obliterating realities;
hence the vivid patches of local color provided by the timeless South India of R.K. Narayan's novels
and the cool pastels added by the later fiction of Anita Desai. The Indian novels of Paul Scott and Ruth
Jhabvala also fall comfortably between those two poles. For a long time it has seemed that novels from
India write their own blurbs: poised, witty, delicate, sparkling.
What this fiction has been missing is a different kind of ambition, something just a little coarse, a
hunger to swallow India whole and spit it out. It needed a touch of Saul Bellow's Augie March
brashness, Bombay rather than Chicago-born, and going at things in its own special Bombay way.
Now, in ''Midnight's Children,'' Salman Rushdie has realized that ambition.
If I am to do more than describe my pleasure in this book, if I am to summarize and interpret, I would
have to start by saying that ''Midnight's Children'' is about the narrator's growing up in Bombay
between 1947 and 1977 (and about the 32 years of his grandparents' and parents' lives before that). It
is also a novel of India's growing up; from its special, gifted infancy to its very ordinary, drained
adulthood. It is a record of betrayal and corruption, the loss of ideals, culminating with ''The
Widow's'' Emergency rule. As a growing-up novel with allegorical dimensions, it will remind readers
of ''Augie March'' and maybe of Gunter Grass's ''The Tin Drum,'' Laurence Sterne's ''Tristram
Shandy,'' and Celine's ''Death on the Installment Plan'' as well as the less-portentous portions of V.S.
Naipaul. But it would be a disservice to Salman Rushdie's very original genius to dwell on literary
analogues and ancestors. This is a book to accept on its own terms, and an author to welcome into
world company.
The ''midnight's children'' of the title are the 1,001 children born in the first hour of Indian
independence, Aug. 15, 1947. Two of these babies are born in the same Bombay nursing home on the
very stroke of midnight: a boy born to wealth and a boy born to the streets. And, of course, a
nursemaid switches babies: a street singer cuckolded by a departing Englishman is given the
aristocratic Muslim infant and names him Shiva; a wealthy Kashmiri-descended family, the Aziz/Sinais,
is given the ''cucumber-nosed'' English-Hindu and names him Saleem. Shiva and Saleem (the narrator)
are destined to be mortal enemies from the stroke of midnight.
Saleem receives all the attention. His birth is celebrated with fireworks, and Prime Minister Nehru
sends a letter saying that his fate will forever be entwined with that of India. Growing up on a Bombay
estate, he bumps his head one day while hiding in his mother's laundry hamper and discovers a gift for
telepathy. From the age of nine, he can enter other lives at will, see through walls, plumb all secrets,
including the secret of his true parentage. But his telepathic gifts bring death and destruction and very
little happiness. He discovers that every one of the midnight children is miraculously gifted; only
Saleem is telepathic, but some can travel through time (and even report that India is destined to be
ruled by a ''urinedrinking dotard'') and one can change sex at will. The extravagance of Mr. Rushdie's
inventions will call to mind the hovering presence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez; call it a tropical
synchronicity.
The midnight children are the hope of the nation, and they await Saleem's calling of a ''midnight
parliament.'' The only thing inhibiting Saleem from embracing his political destiny arises from his fear
of the murdering street tough Shiva, whom he knows to be the rightful inheritor of all his privileges.
And so, because of Saleem's fear and guilt, the gifts of the midnight children are never pooled. When
they do finally meet, it is during Mrs. Gandhi's ''Emergency.'' Because of the threat they pose to the
Only True Succession, the 581 surviving midnight's children are sterilized, and then treated to an even
deadlier procedure: They are sperectomized - drained of hope.
(Perhaps you wondered about the real reasons for the Emergency, the various Indo-Pakistani wars, the
deaths of certain Indian and Pakistani political figures? Simple: to destroy Saleem, the Sinais and the
gifted extended family of midnight's children. The plot of this novel is complicated enough, and
flexible enough, to smuggle Saleem into every major event in the subcontinent's past 30 years. Saleem
the Nose - variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and Piece-of-the-Moon -
knows).
The complex plotting of the book can be gauged (and its playfulness appreciated) by observing how
closely an old seer's prophecy is followed. Of Saleem, it is predicted shortly before his birth: '' 'A son
... who will never be older than his motherland - neither older nor younger. ... There will be two
heads - but you shall see only one - there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees. ... Newspaper
praises him, two mothers raise him! Bicyclists love him - but, crowds will shove him! Sisters will
weep; cobras will creep. ... Washing will hide him - voices will guide him! Friends mutilate him -
blood will betray him! ... Spittoons will brain him - doctors will drain him - jungle will claim him -
wizards reclaim him! Soldiers will try him - tyrants will fry him ... He will have sons without having
sons! He will be old before he is old! And he will die ... before he is dead.' ''
As a Bombay book, which is to say, a big-city book, ''Midnight's Children'' is coarse, knowing,
comfortable with Indian pop culture and, above all, aggressive. Salman Rushdie assumes that the
differences between Colaba and Chembur are as important, and can be made as interesting, as the
differences between Brooklyn and The Bronx. ''We headed north,'' Saleem notes, ''past Breach Candy
Hospital and Mahalaxmi Temple, north along Hornby Vellard past Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium and Haji
Ali's island tomb ... We were heading towards the anonymous mass of tenements and fishing-villages
and textile-plants and film-studios that the city became in these northern zones. ...'' Its characters speak
in many voices: ''Once upon a time there were Radha and Krishna, and Rama and Sita, and Laila and
Majnu; also (because we were not unaffected by the West) Romeo and Juliet, and Spencer Tracy and
Katherine Hepburn.'' Much of the dialogue (the best parts) reads like the hip vulgarity - yaar! - of the
Hindi film magazine. The desiccated syllables of T.S. Eliot, so strong an influence upon other
Anglo-Indian writers, are gone. ''Midnight's Children'' sounds like a continent finding its voice.
How Indian is it? It is slangy, and a taste for India (or a knowledge of Bombay) obviously heightens the
response. Here is a description of a cafe where Saleem's mother goes secretly to meet her dishonored
first husband: ''The Pioneer Cafe was not much when compared to the Gaylords and Kwalitys of the
city's more glamorous parts; a real rutputty joint, with painted boards proclaiming LOVELY LASSI
and FUNTABULOUS FALOODA and BHEL-PURI BOMBAY FASHION, with filmi playback music
blaring out from a cheap radio by the cash-till, a long narrow greeny room lit by flickering neon, a
forbidding world in which broken-toothed men sat at reccine-covered tables with crumpled cards and
expressionless eyes.'' Very Indian.
Of course there are a few false notes. There is a shorter, purer novel locked inside this shaggy
monster. A different author might have teased it out, a different editor might have insisted upon it. I'm
glad they didn't. There are moments when the effects are strained, particularly in the early chapters,
when an ancient Kashmiri boatman begins sounding like ''The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man.'' On a
more serious level, Mr. Rushdie at first has a difficult time endowing the villains of Indian politics
with mythic stature (Grass's Germany made it so easy); petty household intrigues seem more
momentous than the misaffairs of state (Marquez's Latin America made it easy too). But with Ayub
Khan, the Bangladesh war, ''The Widow'' and her son, the later pages darken quite handsomely. The
flow of the book is toward the integration of a dozen strongly developed narratives, and in ways that
are marvelous to behold, integration is achieved. The myriad personalities of Saleem, imposed by the
time, place and circumstance of his extraordinary birth (''So much, yaar, inside one person,'' remarks
a Pakistani soldier, of the Saleem then known as Buddha, the tracker, ''so many bad things, no wonder
he kept his mouth shut!''), are reduced to a single, eloquent, ordinary soul. The flow of the book
rushes to its conclusion in counterpointed harmony: myths intact, history accounted for, and a
remarkable character fully alive.
Clark Blaise's most recent books are ''Lunar Attractions,'' a
novel, and ''Days and Nights in Calcutta'' (with Bharati Mukherjee), a memoir. He
teaches at Skidmore College.
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