Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children
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Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children received awards when it was published in 1981 and developed a fictional world that played off the political, social, and cultural history of India. The novel is structured around a religious procession through the subcontinent of India. The novel celebrates a key moment in Indian history, the moment of independence and the 1,001 children who were born just after midnight on the day of independence, August 15, 1947. These are the "midnight's children" of the title, and they are the hope of the new nation, the young people who will control the future and decide the destiny of the millions of people living in India. Rushdie's style mixes illusion and reality, myth and legend with everyday life, Indian history with a fictional tale, and does so through the eyes of the narrator, Saleem, who Scheherezade-like tells his story in an ongoing narrative created when Saleem is 30, in 1987, looking back to that moment in 1947 when he was the chief of the children of midnight. Rushdie draws on a wide variety of mythology and uses allusions to different literary and religious works to explore the nature of fiction and reality, issues of myth, conceptions of religious faith, and cultural contrasts between the societies of England and India. Nothing is simple in this novel which has characters with fantastic lives who represent good and evil and a variety of mixtures in between, often at one and the same time. In the chapter entitled "Mercuro
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me independent as Bangladesh in 1971). Fighting broke out almost immediately between Muslims and Hindus, and some 7 million Muslims fled from India to Pakistan, while about 6 million Hindus left Pakistan for India. This is the turmoil that is about to start in Rushdie's novel, and the war taking place around Saleem begins with the war against the British and continues with the war between India and Pakistan.
Saleem is one of the children born at the moment of India's liberation, so his life fits precisely with the history of modern India. His family situation also reflects the complexities of Indian history, especially the religious conflicts of the time. The family patriarch was Dr. Aziz, who earlier in the century came from Muslim Kashmir, a disputed territory between Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. Dr. Aziz moved to India, and his granddaughter married a well-to-do Muslim businessman named Ahmed Sinai. Saleem is born in Bombay, and his birth is given added importance by being preceded by a prophecy which everyone finds impossible to understand, but which comes true in every particular. One reason for this adds to the complexities of Saleem's family life, for Saleem is not the child everyone believes but is instead an i
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Approximate Word count = 1850
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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