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Midnight's Children | Introduction

When it was published in 1981, Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize, Great Britain's equivalent of the U.S. Pulitzer Prize; in 1993, the novel was awarded the "Booker of Bookers," a honor accorded to the best novel to be published in the competition's first twenty-five years. The book follows the life of Saleem Sinai, who is born at the very moment in 1947 when India gained its independence from British colonial rule. The infant Saleem is switched at birth with a child from a rich family and as a result leads a life of luxury until the mistake is discovered. Like the other children born that night, whom he dubs "the children of midnight," he finds himself to have mystical powers; despite the advantages conferred on him, Saleem's life takes him down paths of struggle and ruin before he is able to find peace.

Midnight's Children, roughly based on the early life of its author, Salman Rushdie, is considered a masterful blend of fiction, politics, and magic. Critics credit it with making the worldwide literary audience aware of the changes that India underwent throughout the twentieth century. With his masterful control of the English language and his ability to render even the most minute events in full, vivid details, Rushdie takes readers on an imaginative trip that makes them see his native country in a way that they never did before.

Midnight's Children Summary

Book One

Midnight's Children is the first-person narrative of Saleem Sinai, an obscure thirty-year-old pickle factory worker who writes the fantastic story of his life each night, reading it aloud each night and having it commented on by a doting woman named Padma. He starts his story by describing how his grandfather came to the Kashmir region of India in 1915 after receiving his medical degree from Oxford and how he was approached by a wealthy landowner to examine his daughter. He was not allowed to look at her, though, and during each examination for months could only view her through a hole in a sheet that was held up by attendants. Aadam Aziz, Saleem's grandfather, fell in love with his grandmother, Naseem Ghani, by viewing her in parts.

After their marriage, the couple is in Amritsar on April 13, 1919, when British troops massacre hundreds of Indian nationalists. Doctor Aziz avoids being killed in a confrontation when, sneezing, he bends over as the troops fire.

The narrative jumps to 1942, when Aadam and Naseem have grown children, three girls and two boys, and live in Agra. Aadam becomes optimistic about India's coming freedom in advance of the arrival of Mian Abdullah, a social activist known as the Hummingbird. The poet Nadir Khan, dating Aziz's daughter Emerald, is one of the Humming-bird's confidantes: when Abdullah is assassinated, Khan comes to the Aziz house and is hidden in the basement for three years. During his confinement, he and Mumtaz Aziz fall in love and are married. Emerald, feeling jilted, tells the army officer, Major Zulfikar, that Khan is hidden in the house. Zulfikar falls in love with Emerald and marries her; Khan runs away; Mumtaz becomes attracted to a leather merchant, Ahmed Sinai, and marries him, changing her first name to Amina.

Ahmed and Amina move to Delhi: though she does not love him, she does want to have children. Ahmed's business is threatened when he finds out that local criminals demand protection money from businessmen, including him. As tensions between Muslims and Hindus intensify, an angry mob chases a street vendor, Lifafa Das, and, standing between him and the mob, Amina makes a very public announcement that she is pregnant. Ahmed and some other businessmen arrange to make payments to the gangsters, but when they leave a suitcase containing the payment money at a deserted fort, a monkey steals it: that night, Ahmed's warehouse burns down. After Ahmed collects the... ยป Complete Midnight's Children Summary