Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie (1981)
“A man born at the exact midnight of Indian independence discovers that history isn't something that happens to you — you ARE it, and it is trying to kill you.”
About Salman Rushdie
Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born on June 19, 1947, in Bombay — two months before Indian independence, to a Muslim family whose patriarch had educated himself into the professional class. Like Saleem, he left Bombay at fourteen (for Rugby School in England), and later attended King's College, Cambridge. He worked in advertising in London before Midnight's Children made him internationally famous in 1981. The novel won the Booker Prize and, twenty-five years later, the Booker of Bookers (the best Booker Prize winner of all time). In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death over The Satanic Verses. He lived under police protection for a decade. In 2022 he was stabbed on stage in New York, losing sight in one eye. He continues to write.
Life → Text Connections
How Salman Rushdie's real experiences shaped specific elements of Midnight's Children.
Rushdie was born two months before Indian independence, into a Muslim family in Bombay
Saleem born at the exact midnight of independence — Rushdie exaggerates his own temporal proximity to the event into literal simultaneity
The autobiographical fantasy tells us something true about how people who lived through independence experienced it: as fundamentally personal, as a birth of self and nation together.
Rushdie's family moved from Bombay to Karachi (for business, not anti-Muslim riots, but still) during his adolescence
The Sinai family's move from Bombay to Pakistan after riots — the displacement from the India of possibility to the Pakistan of constraint
Rushdie processed his own displacement through Saleem's, giving the novel's second section its peculiar quality of exile-within-exile.
Rushdie watched the Emergency from London, interviewing survivors and reading obsessively about it before writing Book Three
The Emergency sections are the novel's most politically specific — Rushdie writes the Widow and the sterilizations with the precision of someone who had to research what he didn't witness
The distance from the Emergency gave Rushdie the perspective to see it clearly; the personal investment of the Bombay sections gave the novel its emotional engine.
Rushdie's name 'Salman' is close to 'Saleem'; his father renamed himself 'Rushdie' after the medieval philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes)
The novel's meditation on naming, renaming, and the arbitrariness of identity — Saleem's name was assigned by a nurse's whim
Rushdie came from a family that understood naming as self-construction. The perforated sheet, the swapped babies — the arbitrariness of identity is both philosophical and biographical.
Historical Era
1915-1977: Late British India through Partition through the Emergency
How the Era Shapes the Book
The novel's entire structure is a response to the Emergency. Rushdie began writing Midnight's Children partly as a way of asking: how did India — the democracy born with such promise in 1947 — produce Indira Gandhi's authoritarian nightmare by 1975? The midnight's children are the answer: the possibilities of independence that were systematically destroyed by the narrowing of Indian democracy. Every element of the novel that seems playful or whimsical is also a political argument about what was at stake.