Characters
SALEEM SINAI
Saleem Sinai is the protagonist and narrator of Midnight’s Children. He is born, along with one other child, at the exact moment of India’s independence. His identity, however, is switched at birth. As a result, he is raised by a prosperous family in Bombay, while his counterpart and future rival, Shiva, is raised in poverty. Saleem has the powers of telepathy and a preternaturally acute sense of smell, which allow him to find the other children of midnight and create the Midnight’s Children’s Conference. As he approaches his thirty-first birthday, he says he is nearing death. His body is literally falling apart, and it’s only a matter of time before he crumbles into dust. Driven by a desire to beat his biological clock, Saleem narrates his life story to his devoted and loving caretaker, Padma. His tale, which begins with his grandfather Aadam and is at times unreliable and contrived, represents not only his individual life story but also the entire history of postcolonial India. All the major events in his life correspond to important political events in Indian history, leading him to compare his narrative to religious texts. Given his fantastic birth and extraordinary powers, the prime minister of India, Indira Ghandi, seeks to destroy him along with the other midnight’s children.
AADAM AZIZ
Saleem’s grandfather. Aadam is the patriarch of the family, a doctor and skeptic whose loss of faith leaves what he refers to as a “hole” inside of him. Aadam falls in love with his wife, Naseem, after only being allowed to see her through a hole in a perforated sheet.
NASEEM GHANI
Saleem’s grandmother, and Aadam Aziz’s wife. After marriage, Naseem becomes known as Reverend Mother, in part because of her religious devotion. As her husband withers away with age, Reverend Mother grows increasingly large and powerful.
TAI
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An old boatman from Kashmir. Tai is a mysterious, ancient, and wise figure who remains resentful of the world’s encroachment into his territory until his death.
Biography
Salman Rushdie was born into a wealthy Muslim business family in Bombay in 1947, a few weeks before the end of British colonial rule and the Partition of the subcontinent into the two new nations of India and Pakistan. After early education in the city, Rushdie attended boarding school in England and received his undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge, where he studied Islamic history. He worked in advertising in London for several years, and wrote his first book-a science fiction novel-on the side. With the publication of Midnight’s Children (1980) and its immense literary and commercial success, including winning the Booker Prize in 1981, Rushdie was able to turn to writing full time, contributing to periodicals throughout the anglophone world in the 1980’s while producing his next two novels Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses (1988). Among his other important works were The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), the surreal saga of an Indian family of Jewish Portuguese descent, with connections to the last Muslim ruler of Moorish Spain in the fifteenth century, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), a novel about the love triangle interwoven with the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Around 2000, Rushdie eased back into public life by moving to the United States, teaching at various universities and reading his work to large audiences. In 2005 Rushdie published Shalimar the Clown, and in 2008 The Enchantress of Florence. In 2007 Rushdie who is a naturalized British citizen was knighted and toward the end of the decade he began to spend time in London with his family. Recently Rushdie published Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), a wonder tale about the way we live now, a rich and multifaceted work that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story to bring alive a world – our world – that has been plunged into an age of unreason. Inspired by 2,000 years of storytelling tradition yet rooted in the concerns of our present moment, it is a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of the imagination.
The Perforated Sheet
“The Perforated Sheet,” is actually an excerpt from the first two chapters of Midnight’s Children. It introduces us to Saleem Sinai, the protagonist and narrator, and to the story of his life and origins. Saleem is born at midnight, between August 14 and 15 1947, the moment at which India and Pakistan became separate nations. As a child of that historic hour, he finds that his destiny is entwined with India’s fate as a nation, so that his life unfolds as a precise parallel to the country’s collective history thereafter. We encounter the beginning of that story as Saleem sees it, the time almost half a century before his birth, when his grandfather returns from Europe with a medical degree; sets up a practice in his hometown of Srinagar, Kashmir and meets the woman who is destined to become his wife, thereby launching the cascade of events that will culminate two generations later in Saleem’s momentous arrival. In the novel, every important event in the history of the Sinai family, from Saleem’s grandparents onward, is a funny farcical echo of every major event in the history of the Indian subcontinent.
Themes
Born at the dawn of Indian independence and destined, upon his death, to break into as many pieces as there are citizens of India, Saleem Sinai manages to represent the entirety of India within his individual self. The notion that a single person could possibly embody a teeming, diverse, multitudinous nation like India encapsulates one of the novel’s fundamental concerns: the tension between the single and the many. The dynamic relationship between Saleem’s individual life and the collective life of the nation suggests that public and private will always influence one another, but it remains unclear whether they can be completely equated with one another. Throughout the novel, Saleem struggles to contain all of India within himself—to cram his personal story with the themes and stories of his country—only to disintegrate and collapse at the end of his attempt.
Politically speaking, the tension between the single and the many also marks the nation of India itself. One of the fastest growing nations in the world, India has always been an incredibly diverse. Its constitution recognizes twenty-two official languages, and the population practices religions as varied as Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, and Buddhism, among many others. Indian culture is similarly hybrid, having been influenced by countless other cultures over the millennia of its development. At the same time, however, maintaining India’s sprawling diversity in a peaceful fashion has often proved difficult: India’s division into the Islamic nation of Pakistan and the secular, but mostly Hindu nation of India—a process known as Partition—remains the most striking example of the desire to contain and reduce India’s plurality. In Midnight’s Children, the child Saleem watches as protestors attempt to do divide the city of Bombay along linguistic lines, another attempt to categorize and cordon off multiplicity.
Factual errors and dubious claims are essential aspects of Saleem’s fantastic narrative. He willfully acknowledges that he misplaced Gandhi’s death, an obviously seminal moment in India’s history, as well as willfully misremembers the date of an election. He frets over the accuracy of his story and worries about future errors he might make. Yet, at the same time, after acknowledging his error, Saleem decides to maintain his version of events, since that’s how they appeared to occur to him and now there can be no going back. Despite its potential historical inaccuracies, Saleem sees his story as being of equal importance as the world’s most important religious texts. This is not only his story but also the story of India. The errors in his story, in addition to casting a shadow of doubt over some of what he claims, point to one of the novel’s essential claims: that truth is not just a matter of verifiable facts. Genuine historical truth depends on perspective—and a willingness to believe. Saleem notes that memory creates its own truth, and so do narratives. Religious texts and history books alike stake their claim in truth not only because they are supported by facts but also because they have been codified and accepted upon, whether by time or faith. The version of history Saleem offers comes filtered through his perspective, just as every other version of history comes filtered through some alternate perspective. For Saleem, his version is as true as anything else that could be written, not just because this is the way he has arranged it, but because this is the version he believes.
Saleem claims that, much like his narrative, he is physically falling apart. His body is riddled with cracks, and, as a result, the past is spilling out of him. His story, spread out over sixty-three years, is a fragmented narrative, oscillating back and forth between past and present and frequently broken up further by Saleem’s interjections. In addition to the narrative and physical fragmentation, India itself is fragmented. Torn apart by Partition, it is divided into two separate countries, with the east and west sections of Pakistan on either side of India. This division is taken even further when East and West Pakistan are reclassified as two separate countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Within India, language marchers agitate for further partitions based upon linguistic lines. New nationalities are created, and with them come new forms of cultural identity that reflect the constant divisions.
Hybridity
Memory and Narrative
Fragmentation
The Perforated Sheet
The perforated sheet through which Aadam Aziz falls in love with his future wife performs several different symbolic functions throughout the novel. Unable to see his future wife as a whole, Aadam falls in love with her in pieces. As a result, their love never has a cohesive unity that holds them together.
Knees and Nose
When Aadam Aziz first kneels down to pray, his knees touch the floor and his nose hits the ground. Knees and nose, in this instance, represent an act of prayer, as well as the submission and humility necessary faith. After hitting his nose on the ground, however, Aadam rejects that submission, and a hole opens up inside of him.
Salman Rushdie
Novels
1947-Present
