The Historical Context of Midnight’s Children

    Depicting the major historical events of Indian history, Midnight's Children is sometimes recognized as a historical novel, Yet the novel combines the features of magic realism with historical facts, and so it could be read as either fantasy or a history book. As the author himself describes it in the introductory chapter to his novel: "In the West people tended to read Midaght's Children as a fantasy, while in India people thought of it as pretty realistic, almost a history book" (MC ,xv).Being a fiction, the novel cannot be seen as a standard text on history, because it is narrated from an Indian point of view and although the author tries to remain objective, he cannot completely avoid his subjective opinions and feelings. In his novel Rushdie writes that "the reality is a question of perspective" (MC ,229) and therefore in the novel Rushdie creates his own history of India. Yet on the other hand, the reader might get occasionally confused since Rushdie, admitting that everybody's reality is different, sometimes tries to support the historical facts depicted in the novel, claiming that "reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real (MC ,278).

     Salman Rushdie, uses in his works, tales from various genres fantasy, mythology, religion, oral tradition etc. Rushdje started off as a novelist with the work Grimus in 1975. This was a fantastical science fiction. In 1981, he came up with his second novel Midnight's Children In this novel, he writes about India's strive for independence from British colonialism. Midnight's Children shows how history revolves around Saleem Sinai, the narrator protagonist of the story and ten thousand children born in the midnight of India"s independence. Along with The Man Booker 11 Prize, Midnight's Children won the James Tait Black Memorial prize in 1981. This work was also awarded with the Booker of Bookers prize and the best of all time winners in 1993 and 2008. The success of this novel made Rushdie a celebrity lionized by the media the world over(Dita, 18).

    In Midnight's Children (1980), for example, Rushdie presents his readers with a fabulous tale narrated by Saleem Sinai, who, by virtue of being born in Bombay on 15 August 1947 at the stroke of midnight, is the first child born in independent India. Saleem offers us his autobiography, but his story is also the history of twentieth century India; every personal event in the life of Saleem and his family is inextricably linked to the historical and political events that unfold in India. As Saleem puts it, he "had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, [his] destinies indissolubly chained to those of [his] country" (3). As we read Saleem's account, we are expected to believe, among other things, that Saleem was responsible for the language riots that occurred in the 1950s, that he played a pivotal role in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, and that in 1975. Indira Gandhi imprisoned political opponents and suspended demo- cratic rights during her self-proclaimed "Emergency" in direct response to the activities of Saleem and his Conference of Mid- night's Children (that is, the children who were born during India's first hour of independence and who possessed magical power)(Price, 92).

Midnight Children, underlines the pervasiveness of racially othering ideas and behaviors in India. Rushdie emphasizes the persistence of colonial-influenced phenotypic racism, and by describing how Indira Gandhi's government uses biopower discourses and technologies to racialize, persecute, and sterilize the children in the novel, he implies that the post-independence Indian nation-state has rejected pluralism and tolerance. The sterilization of Saleem Sinai and his fellow magical children near 12 the end of Midnight is the novel's most graphic depiction of the racializing biopolitics that Rushdie claims has become more prevalent in Indian central government since Nehru's death. Midnight, on the other hand, illustrates the pervasiveness of race thinking outside of state institutions in twentieth-century India in its early chapters. Rushdie portrays racism as a relic of British colonialism among ordinary Indians(Hopkins, 3)

Bibliography

Price, David W. "Salman Rushdie's" Use and Abuse of History" in" Midnight's Children"." ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 25.2 (1994).

Hopkins, Lucy. "The Child as Nation: Embodying the Nation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children." Childhood and Nation: Interdisciplinary Engagements. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016. 39-52.

Polcarová, Dita. "Midnight s Children."2013