Salman Rushdie
The American statesman Dean Acheson informed a conference at the US Military
Academy at West Point in 1962, that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire but has not yet
found a role.’ The first half of this aphorism was nothing new, but the second half
has not lost its point. Empire and its ends were for a time the subjects of the fiction
of Paul Scott, J. G. Farrell and J. G. Ballard, and indirectly affected that of William
Golding. The end of empire has recently come home in literature less through Brits
than through the writing in English of people from former colonies, some of whom
live in the UK. It made an impact, well beyond circles already interested in these
things, with the publication ofSalman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Childrenin 1981.
Rushdie,son of an Indian businessman, was himself educated at Rugby School, and,
like his father, at Cambridge, taking a First in English. So, although born in a Muslim
family in Bombay in 1947, he is a British citizen and no longer a Muslim nor alto-
gether an Indian.
Rushdie’s novel or romance was of a type new to English, presenting history via
auto biographical fantasy. It begins with the narrator’s birth at midnight on 15
August 1947, when Muslim Pakistan and a largely Hindu India were born as sepa-
rate independent states: parturition as partition. Entangled lives of that generation
are made vivid, and unfamiliar things perceived with cultural difference. Rushdie
adopted what is often called magic(al) realism, a now common international mode
in which realist narrative includes episodes of impossible fantasy of a symbolic kind;
here mixed with elements from ‘Bollywood’ films, made in Bombay, India’s
Hollywood. (Mumbai film production is greater than that of Hollywood.) The
Satanic Verses, for example, a later novel of Rushdie’s, opens with two entwined char-
acters singing rival songs as they fall from an airliner to land on a snowy British
beach unharmed, a scene from mythology, fantasy or dream. Similar things are
found in Latin American, and earlier in the Central European novel, as in Gunter
Grass’s The Tin Drum(1959). The publishers sent a copy of this work, offensive to
many Muslims, to the Ayatollah Khameini. This earned the author a fatwa or death
sentence, a British police guard, and a lasting notoriety. Some of its translators have
been targeted by assassins, one of them successfully.
Midnight’s Children twins political history with the hallucinating vision of Saleem
Sinai,born at the midnight of sub-continental independence, in August 1947. ‘I am
India’, says Saleem. His names are phonetic variations on Salman Rushdie’s. The
pr otagonist and the author both had Muslim boyhoods in Bombay. The bold
‘nation-twin’ idea commands interest, but in the long run becomes an inconven-
ience. In this the novel resembles other prolonged feats of narration, such as Joyce’s
Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, or Les Murray’s verse novel Freddie Nep tune. Like
the last, it shows a desire to make the history of his time pass before the eyes of one
reporter. Saleem witnesses key events of national history. ‘As I placed Saleem at the
ce ntre of my new scheme’, Rushdie wrote in preface to a later edition of the book,
‘I understood that his time of birth would oblige me immensely to increase the size
of my canvas.’
Midnight’s Children made an impact because of the novelty and energy of its
narration, the size of its subject and its relevance to the past and present of the UK,
many of whose inhabitants have family links to the sub-continent. The recent
histor y of the world’s largest democracy has its own importance, and the writing
brings India vividly to mind, with its torrential sequences of Indian sights and habits422 15 · CONTEMPORARIES