Midnight’s Children 917and no sane human being ever trusts some-
one else’s version more than his own.That is the nature of memory, and in Midnight’s
Children, despite the often fantastical plot details,
the reader is made to understand that memory
brings us to our own truth, and “reality” is of second-
ary importance to that.
Jennifer McClinton-Temple
natIonaLISm in Midnight’s Children
Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Midnight’s Children, is
“handcuffed to history,” as he says on the first page
of his story. He is born at midnight, on August 15,
1947—the precise moment at which India became
an independent country. His face, he will later tell us,
is a “map of India,” with bulging temples on either
side of his forehead. The novel lets us know from
the start that his connection with his home country
is not merely casual. His destinies are “indissolubly
chained to those of [his] country.” The fates of Sal-
eem and his family will always be tied inextricably
to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the fates of all
who live there.
Fate begins intervening for Saleem long before
his birth, when his grandfather, Aadam Aziz, is
present at the infamous Amritsar Massacre, dur-
ing which British troops, under the command of
Reginald Dyer, opened fire on a peaceful gather-
ing of men, women, and children, killing up to
400 people. This event turns his grandfather into a
nationalist. He says, “I started off as a Kashmiri and
not much of a Muslim. Then I got a bruise on my
chest that turned me into an Indian.” Saleem’s own
birth, 28 years later, forever ties the family to India,
as the child is publicly celebrated as the first child
of the new nation, one of “Midnight’s Children.”
At first, he seems as if he, a Muslim child born in a
predominantly Hindu country, might well represent
the new era. However, as things began to deteriorate
for Muslims in the new democracy, Saleem and
his family emigrate to West Pakistan, or the “West
Wing” as Saleem calls it. His entire family—save
himself, his sister, and his uncle Mustapha—is killed
during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, due to their
associations with Muslim leaders. Saleem finds him-
self in the Pakistani army, ultimately fighting against
his own Hindu friends during the 1971 Bangladesh
Liberation War. He winds up in a ghetto in Delhi,
wanted for war crimes, hiding from his old enemy
Shiva, also born at the fateful stroke of midnight
and now a general in the Indian army. He is steril-
ized in Indira Gandhi’s forced vasectomy campaign.
Finally, his son, whom he will name Aadam after his
grandfather, is born at the precise moment Indira
Gandhi declares a state of emergency on June 26,
1975, effectively allowing her to rule by decree.
This history, Saleem’s history, turns out to be
a myth. For Aadam is not really Saleem’s son, but
Shiva’s. And Saleem is not really the son of Ahmed
and Amina Sinai, but rather the son of William
Methwold and Vanita, the Hindu wife of the
impoverished street performer Wee Willie Winkie.
Switched at birth (with Shiva, no less) by the Chris-
tian nanny Mary Perreria, Saleem’s whole life has
been a myth. India, too, Midnight’s Children seems to
be saying, has never truly existed. Before he narrates
his own birth, Saleem says of India,[A] nation which had never previously existed
was about to win its freedom, catapulting us
into a world which, although it had five thou-
sand years of history, although it had invented
the game of chess and traded with Mid-
dle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite
imaginary; into a mythical land, a country
which would never exist except by the efforts
of a phenomenal collective will—except in a
dream we all agreed to dream.In India, it seems, nationalism can only be thought
of—it cannot be real. The country is too vast, too
full of division and sectarianism, and has too much
history to be simply united into an entity that
can peacefully move forward. Indeed, even at the
moment of its birth, division was already there, in
the form of Pakistan, divided into the western sec-
tion (Kashmir and Punjab) and the eastern section
(most of Bengal) and separated by 1,000 miles of
India.
Pakistani nationalism, too, makes no sense to
Saleem as he finds himself on the same side as geno-
cidal murderers and rapists devastating East Paki-
stan, which would ultimately become Bangladesh.