Midnight's Children Postmodernism

Rushdie, Postmodernism & Postcolonialism

Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, published in 1980, was perhaps the seminal text in conceiving opinions as to interplay of post-modern and post-colonial theory. The title of the novel refers to the birth of Saleem Sinai, the novel’s principal narrator, who is born at midnight August 15th 1947, the precise date of Indian independence. From this remarkable coincidence we are immediately drawn to the conclusion that the novel’s concerns are of the new India, and how someone born into this new state of the ‘Midnight’s child’, if you will, interacts with this post-colonial state. To characterise the novel as one merely concerned with post-colonial India, and its various machinations, is however a reductive

Yet as Linda Hutcheon points out in her essay ‘Circling the Downspout of Empire’, ‘post-modernism is politically ambivalent’ (biography available at http://www.athabascau.ca/cll/writers/hutcheon_biblio.html). The practice of magic realism with its challenge to conventionally accepted distinctions of genre and its questioning of reality is applicable to both movements. The element of regionalism in magic realist work contests the centrality of the metropolitan text, that is, often texts which are associated with magic realism are on the periphery binary, as opposed to the centrality of what are regarded as more conventional metropolitan texts. Another definition of magic realism can be found at http://www.qub.ac.uk/english/imperial/india/Magic.htm. and http://artcon.rutgers.edu/artists/magicrealism/magic.html also contains a definition. This genre is often interchangeable with that of surrealism, here are some examples of surrealist and magic realist

Seleem encounters the very real events of Nehru’s first Five-year plan in 1956, the Indo Pakistan war of 1965 and the conviction of Indira Gandhi in 1975 for election malpractice in the Indian ‘Emergency’. Although he is not adverse to giving the Midnight’s child in Saleem Sinai supernatural powers simply due to the fortuitousness of his birthright. Perhaps the best reason given as to this rejection of convention on the part of Rushdie was given by the author himself on a documentary on channel four entitled the Bandung file aired on February 14th 1989 where he