Can a writer, a poet or an artist be robbed of that right? He may be caught in the abstractions and vagaries of language, but the struggle is itself an expression of freedom and a vindication of the capacity of the writer's voice to shape reality. In telling both his own story and that of modern India, the narrator Saleem Sinai is confined by nothing but “the limits of his means”. The vision of India that emerges from it is more a product of the novelist's imagination than of the historian's search for truth, so much that it blurs the distinctions we often make between personal and public history, between private spirituality and communal religion. Rightfully, that novel, acclaimed as a major milestone in postcolonial literature, not only risked offending some readers, but also fiercely challenged our understanding of history, nationhood, and narrative. Rushdie's novel ponders over the history of India (and Pakistan, and Bangladesh) through several decades, introduces well over a hundred characters, and keeps those dazzling stories magnificently entwined. Saleem Sinai's life parallels the changing fortunes of the country after independence and the picture that comes out is not very flattering of India. But the novel is a family story first and a political allegory about India second: a glorious reinvention of the Bombay of Rushdie’s childhood, of his own family stories.
Midnight's Children took its title from Nehru's speech delivered at the stroke of midnight, 14-15 August 1947. The work aroused a great deal of controversy in India because of its unflattering portrayal of Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay.Īlso read: Why India is silent on Salman Rushdie Foreshadowing the political turmoil that would embroil his later career (the 1989 fatwa of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini condemning him to death for his The Satanic Verses), Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sued Rushdie and his publisher for libel, forcing them to make a public apology. Salman Rushdie’s breakthrough 1981 novel, Midnight's Children that mounted scathing attacks on political dynasties, corruption, and the legacy of British colonialism, tempering it with abundant humour and self-deprecating jokes, gave serious offence to the ruling dispensation at that time.
On Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a ‘clarion call’ to eliminate parivarvaad (dynastic politics) from the country. “To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.” And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him.