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 "Mercurochrome," Rushdie's method is apparent as he develops a dialogue between Saleem and his mistress reflecting many of the issues facing India over its history.
India was ruled for most of this century by the British colonial power. The British in India integrated the Indian people into their economic system, viewing India as a source for goods to be carried to and sold in Europe. However, there was a shift in policy as disgruntled British manufacturers demanded ...