Midnight's Children

...selfishness, apprehension, and despair...

...And so-agonizingly, improbably, hilariously-it is...

...Una Chandhuri ALL PASSAGES to India, literary or otherwise, before Porster or since, have tended to be, as in Whitman's original, passages "to more than India...

...Through the collected trauma of Partition, the national euphoria of Independence, the buoyant optimism of the first Five Year Plan, the humiliating defeat in the Sino-Indian war, the bragging victory of Bangladesh, the shameless oppression of the Emergency, through all these and many minor scandals and sensations of Indian life, Saleem fights vainly for his own independence (or identity) only to find himself each time inexorably drawn into the center of things...

...The self as world is both the method and the matter of Midnight's Children, which reads like a fantastical gloss on Forster's passionate dictum "Only connect...

...in swallowing the world he must also digest its chaos, its discontinuity, its bits-and-pieces...

...Our ancient national gift for fissiparousness" has infected every generation...

...To understand just one life," says the book's writer-hero, "you have to swallow the world...

...India's dualistic curse has fallen upon him with a vengeance, for he is born at the exact moment of India's independence, midnight, August 15, 1947...

...Yet for all its rendition of an entire nation's spiritual collapse, Midnight's Children is a work of startling vigor, even, in its epic dimensions, of hope...

...Fragmentation-personal, social, historical, ideological-is Saleem's (and India's) bane...

...union is, in 1980, the unity of art...

...But-and this is the paradox of the self-as-world-the coherence he creates is a structure of fragments...

...The vast canvas it unfolds is full of people and places that are often as enchanting as they are grotesque...

...Since then, he has been "handcuffed to history," in a way for which even the letter he receives from the Prime Minister cannot, for all its ominous dualism, prepare him: "Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth...

...it is a literary event-a novel of international importance.onal importance...

...The hero's feverish flight from absurdity is neither religious nor political but-and this is the mark of Rushdie's modernity-literary...

...Saleem Sinai is India, but not just symbolically...

...Nor are Saleem and Shiva alone in their strangeness...

...Now, thirty years after the midnight of "Mountbatten's tick-tock," as the myth of a new India ("a collective fiction in which anything was possible") founders in tyranny and intrigue, Saleem struggles with the bits-and-pieces of his own life, seeking to reverse his awful connection to his country, to bestow meaning on the confusion of India by making sense of himself...

...From Saleem's sister, the Brass Monkey, who sets fire to shoes, to Picture Singh (so called because he was once photographed by Life magazine), the snake-charmer in whom Saleem finally finds a father, every character exudes a magic that makes the surrounding nightmare bearable, almost (for, as with Forster, the "muddle" and the "mystery" are one and the same) desirable...

...it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own...

...his mother, in love with her first, lost husband, contrived to fall in love with her second by dividing him mentally into his component parts, and learning to love a new part each day...

...Once, he was among the many young men forcibly sterilized by "The Widow's" fascist Family Planners...

...I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, to end up meaning-yes, meaning-something...

...I admit it: above all, I fear absurdity...

...Like his grandfather, who was trapped forever "in that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve," Saleem exists in a limbo of guilt and fear, awaiting his changeling's revenge...

...His grandfather, a doctor, fell in love with his wife-to-be while examining parts of her body through' a perforated sheet held modestly before her...

...His changeling is the aptly named Shiva,, he of the "murderous knees," growing to criminality in the violent streets of Bombay and lionized as a hero in the ugly war of Bangladesh...

...And so his text, like his life, is haunted by the digression, the non sequitur, the unsought symbol...

...In him are "united"- perhaps "divided" is more apt-the three cultures that battle for supremacy in the Indian psyche: Hinduism with its passivity and tradition, Islam with its sentimentality and dogmatism, and Christianity with its individualism and dreams of progress...

...The symbolization of India, that inevitable overtaking of India-as-subject by India-as-metaphor, is as much a native as a foreign tendency, and it is precisely this tendency, viewed now as a people's collective psychological burden, that Salman Rushdie takes as the premise for his brilliant new novel, Midnight's Children...

...We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention...

...Finally, with Saleem, schizogenesis has reached its peak...

...now he dreads an even worse fate: "Sperectomy: the draining out of hope...

...There are a thousand "children of midnight," each one born with a magical gift, each gift hopelessly squandered in the thirty years of India's new life...

...Only by transferring himself whole onto paper can the fragmentary hero (he is literally "cracking up"-huge fissures are beginning to appear in his skin) achieve salvation and sanity...

...Rushdie's novel is more than a great Indian novel...

...It is also the means whereby Rushdie recasts the old Forsterian themes of union and separation into a new psychological mold, producing in place of the Englishman's poetic contemplation of the eternal contest between the Many and the One, a nightmarishly real experience of the agony of fragmentation and the struggle for unity...

...He is, in fact, not Saleem at all, not the son of a wealthy Muslim family, but a changeling, the illegitimate son of a Hindu streetsinger's wife and a departing British colonist...

...Perhaps there is nothing more stunning-or paradoxical-about Midnight's Children than the fact that this epic of Indian contradictions and failures becomes, by virtue of its final existence as a coherent work of art, a monument to India's vitality, a sign in itself of India's survival as a culture...

...Meaning is, finally, something you create...

...You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young...

...Saleem's "Midnight's Children's Conference" (the initials MCC stand, to every Indian, for the hated Marlybone Cricket Club), begun with great hopes to discover the "purpose" of the magical children, ends up, like India, fragmented-its members full of distrust...