Midnight's Children Novel Analysis

2903 Words12 Pages

Theme: Nationalism & Identity
Political and Historical Cataclysm in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

M.Vanisree
Associate Professor,
Department of English,
S.V Engineering College for Women,
Tirupati.
E-mail: vanisrinivas14@rediffmail.com Salman Rushdie is a multinational writer. He belongs to different cultures. Both his legacy is somewhat disputed and the same replicate in his novels i.e., existential dilemmas of the individual. Rushdie’s characters create angst in the psyche of the readers. His works create tension and evoke conflicting emotions in the readers. His assertions on secularism and religion are even more ambivalent. Rushdie’s Mid Night’s Children has an intellectual and intercultural richness. This novel ‘Midnight’s …show more content…

He is also acutely aware of how fantastic and far-fetched his narrative sounds to the skeptical, pragmatic Padma. After he emerges from his fever-induced dream, it becomes especially important for Saleem to assert the veracity of his story. Saleem encounters Shiva and came to know that he is the biological son of Ahmed and Amina Sinai who had to beat the brunt of this unjust world for the doing of Mary Pereira. Shiva had become the leader of a notorious gang in the Bombay’s underworld. He did not accept the leadership of Saleem as he too was born on the stroke of midnight. He wanted the joint leadership of the conference by the virtue of his birth. This started a rivalry between Shiva and Saleem, which was going to have far reaching consequences both in their lives as well as in the life of the nation. Shiva became a representative for the force of the evil, which posed a threat to the notions of liberal freedom represented by Saleem. Shiva was used by the ruling Congress party to rig the elections of 1957 in Bombay which resulted in Kasim Khan’s defeat but the Communist Party emerged as the single largest opposition party in the

Open Document