Update: Now featuring the trailer for the soon to be released 2012 film version of Midnight’s Children.
A novel on the grand scale of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) necessarily involves an exchange between local and global. But fortunately Midnight’s Children is an effective introduction to the postcolonial novel in English inasmuch as it thematizes the mediated and fictive quality of attempts to represent the formerly colonized world for a global audience.
The novel imagines that the children born on the midnight of the independence and partition of India and Pakistan on August 15, 1947 acquire special powers such as telepathy and time travel. Saleem, the narrator, uses the power of telepathy to bring together the “midnight’s children” using a kind of psychic equivalent to “All India Radio.” The novel also highlights a series of displacements across borders, as Saleem and his family travel from Delhi to Bombay to Pakistan. Literary critics have pointed out the aesthetics of flight Rushdie uses in these seemingly-magical transformation of time and space. But Rushdie’s novel also connects these effects to media, showing how the distortion of space-time is also connected to the aesthetics of sounds and images and their circulation through global space.
Rushdie’s 1984 article, “Outside the Whale” is a useful supplementary text to give students on the politics of media representations of India in the 1980s. [In addition to the forthcoming film version of Midnight’s Children on which Rushdie himself consulted substantially,] readers may also be familiar with recent filmic analogues such as Slumdog Millionaire, which also seeks to serve up the spectacle of India’s poverty for global audiences. In this sense, it is useful to analyze examples in Rushdie’s novel of mediation by images: the picturesque landscape of the Kashmir Valley described in the opening chapter, the depiction of the traveling “peepshow” of Lifafa Das, containing all the famous sights of India such as the Taj Mahal, and the traveling magician “Pictureji,” whose photo taken by Eastman-Kodak authorizes his performance as a spectacle.
It may also be useful to supplement these examples from Midnight’s Children with images, including colonial photography, picture postcards and early travel films such as by James FitzPatrick in the 1930s. These examples highlight the extent to which Rushdie’s novel is about media and the politics of representation, the fact that how to represent the new nation-state is never taken for granted. Like Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Rushdie’s novel interrogates the condition of existing always already mediated by images.
Regarding Rushdie’s invocation of the English literary tradition, it is useful for readers familiar with canonical 19th and 20th century texts to think not only of the social realist novel’s critique of industrial capitalism (in the manner of Dickens and Gissing), but also of aestheticism and the Irish modernist tradition of using experimentation with the fabric of English to criticize the dominant culture of imperialism. To this end, we can highlight the stated purpose of Saleem’s narration, which is to give the history of the origin and destiny of the new nation that happens to correspond with his own birth, and to situate it alongside Stephen Dedalus’s attempt to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.