Midnight's Children Literary Analysis

Much ink has been wasted by various critics on Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Various facets of his art have been critically scrutinized. Ashutosh Banerjee, for example, studies the narrative technique; Ron Shepherd and M.L Pandit see fantasy; R.S Pathak describes Rushdie’s portrayal of the bond between history and the individual; Neil Ten Kortenaar observes it as an allegory of history; and Goonetileke finds the use of myth in the novel. Rushdie’s intertextual strategies have been the centre of critical inquiry for many critics. Nancy E. Batty, for instance, sees its affinities with the Tales of Arabian Nights, while Robert Alter brings a comparison between Midnight’s Children and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.The aspect that has not as yet been

This “chutnification” of language shows how Rushdie takes pain in depicting his experience with great earnestness, using all the resources he can wield. When, for example, Padma admonishes Saleem for his ‘writery- shitery’ and urges him to be attentive to more basic activity by saying “eat na, food is spoiling” or when the boy Saleem goes spying on his mother to a “real rutputti joined” which advertises its “lovely lassi, Fantabulous Faluda and Bhelpuri Bombay Fashion,” Rushdie seems to use all the linguistic paraphernalia in order to evoke the plurality of urban India for which no single language can do. The very cobweb of life on Indian sub-continent, particularly in the urban areas, is multilingual. The young generation who speak English as a second language usually blend it with the vocabulary items taken from many other Indian languages, particularly Hindi, urdu and the speaker’s mother tongue. In other words, they treat English as any everyday peer –group language and therefore use it in creative, though playful and impure ways. They do it constantly on college campuses, coffee houses, playgrounds and other places where they meet. Rushdie weaves this multilingual rap and woof of life in India into his concern in Midnight’s Children and negotiates it at different levels –ranging from Naseem Aziz’s resistance (“if God meant people to speak many tongues […] why did he put only one in our heads?” (48) to the Pakistani soldiers’ incomprehension of the Mukti Bahini’s song “Amar Sonar Bangla” which “protected [them] from the insidious subversion of the lyric, although their feet did inadvertently tap to the tune” (