Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children Novel & Movie Adaption

Hello friends !

                        Today i'm going to write about the novel "Midnight's Children" by Salman Rushdie and the movie adaption "Midnight's Children" directed by Deepa Mehta and also narrated by Salman Rushdie. This task given by our professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir.

1) Narrative Technique :-

                    It is remarkable that what many consider as Salman Rushdie’s landmark work in fiction, Midnight’s Children, was first adapted to film only in 2012, 31 years after its publication. It was also the first of his works to be filmed. This is noteworthy given the novel’s cinematic self-awareness and the writer’s overt interest in acting and cinema, which he has reiterated over the years.2 Besides publishing, Rushdie has had a long career in the creative economy  in the 1960s as a television script writer in Karachi after acting in the Cambridge Footlights Revue; in the 1970s as a freelance copywriter in advertising agencies and as an actor on the London fringe; and in later years as a script writer and performer of cameo roles in films. 

Cinema, as a subject matter and a distinctive artistic language, resurfaces time and again in the pages of Rushdie’s essays, short stories, novels, and other writings. As many critics have pointed out, the writer’s emotional connection to cinema has translated into cinema itself being put to work as a mediating device in his oeuvre, with his characters often making sense of themselves and the world and coming to terms with their own place in it through cinema.

                          Midnight's Children is the story of Saleem Sinai, and how by virtue of being born at the very same moment of his country's independence at the midnight of August 15th, 1947 he is "handcuffed to history." Saleem and 420 other children are bound by magical powers which bind them to each other, but ultimately to their country. Rushdie explores the emergence of not only modern day India, but also of Pakistan and Bangladesh. 

When Midnight’s Children was published it brought Rushdie extensive literary approval, and has later come to be understood as an example of the

                                                “theoretical preoccupations of 

                                                  postcolonial studies - not only 

                                             manifesting high postmodernism’s 

                                                        aesthetic difficulty, 

                                            experimentation, and play but also

                                                verifying the poststructuralist 

                                                    emphasis on writing and 

                                                               textuality.”

Rushdie’s novel is in Kortenaar’s work discussed from different angles, subjects such as hybridity and magic realism are treated. However, through Kortenaar’s chapter, The Allegory of History, national allegory in the novel is a fundamental topic. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms allegory is a story with a second distinct meaning, the principal technique of allegory is personification whereby abstract qualities are given a human shape. It involves a continuous parallel between different levels of meaning in a text. 

However, in the novel the preceding chapters to Tick Tock are told in retrospect and Saleem’s abundance of stories make it difficult, not only for the reader, but also for the naïve narratee Padma, to follow his jumps in time and space, as well as his many other digressions. After journeys that have brought Saleem to Pakistan, Bangladesh and Delhi, he retires when he has rediscovered his ayah Mary Pereira in his childhood city, Bombay. She now owns a pickle factory and is able to provide him with whatever he needs, and he has the time and opportunity to pickle his memory and write down the story of his life. The setting in the pickle factory where Saleem recounts his stories are said to be a parallel to the frame story of Arabian Nights. This isevidently an intertextual element used to make suspense both in Arabian Nights, also famous as One Thousand and One Nights, and in Midnight’s Children. But in the film the character of Padma is missing, so the responsibility to understand the situation comes over the watchers.  So we can see some threats in the film.

  2) Characters :-

                          These are the main characters. Satya Bhabha as Saleem Sinai, Shriya Saran as Parvati, Siddharth Narayan as Shiva, Darsheel Safary as Saleem Sinai (as a child), Anupam Kher as Ghani, Shabana Azmi as Naseem, Neha Mahajan as Young Naseem, Seema Biswas as Mary, Charles Dance as William Methwold, Samrat Chakrabarti as Wee Willie Winkie, Rajat Kapoor as Aadam Aziz, Soha Ali Khan as Jamila, Rahul Bose as Zulfikar, Anita Majumdar as Emerald, Shahana Goswami as Amina, Chandan Roy Sanyal as Joseph D'Costa, Ronit Roy as Ahmed Sinai, Kulbhushan Kharbanda as Picture Singh, Shikha Talsania as Alia, Zaib Shaikh as Nadir Khan, Sarita Choudhury as Indira Gandhi, Vinay Pathak as Hardy, Kapila Jayawardena as Governor, Ranvir Shorey as Laurel, Suresh Menon as Field Marshal, G.R Perera as Astrologer. 

In the opening scenes we can observe differences in the way the versions address the audience: the novel’s narrator uses the first person to provide, in a deferred and roundabout way, his story; in the film, there is also direct speech, but the narrative proceeds much more unswervingly. The other two versions do not construct a rapport with the audience in such a straightforward way by direct address. In movie, the audience is shown both the historical background on screen and the event of the twin births on stage. Only after these opening scenes does the narrator step in, either as a voiceover or as a character onstage. 

The novel and the film thus seem to initially create a more personal rapport with their constructed audiences. It is significant in this respect that the character of Padma, the novel’s original immediate addressee and audience  the person who listens to and comments on Saleem’s narrative, and the second main character in the novel, after the protagonist is included in the first two adaptations, but in the film she is supplanted by Rushdie’s voiceover.

  3) Themes and Symbols :-

                The third point is the themes and symbols. The film adapted it very well. Rushdie steered the project of adapting Midnight’s Children into film from the outset, exercising an even tighter creative control than in the earlier adaptations, co-authoring the script and acting as executive producer. Another instance of this greater creative control is the use of his own voice to narrate the film, although the choice itself is attributed to Mehta’s insistence. If we talk about the various themes of the novel we can see this major themes :

• Truth and Storytelling
• British Colonialism and Postcolonialism
• Sex and Gender
• Identity and Nationality
• Fragments and Partitioning
• Religion

        And if we talk about the symbols which are used in the novel we can see,

  Symbols

There are very interesting symbol is given in entire novel is considered as allegory of India. So some children are born at midnight and than India is also born at midnight. Saleem Senai who is protagonist and who is born at midnight with whom India’s story also described. Ups and down everything happening we see how India is narrated. Allegory of India is connected with some character so. What we see is history narrated in fictional way. History is narrated is fictionalized or Nation is narrated in fictional way  with imagine world. Whatever happened in novel has actually happened in  India but, it is interpreted in a different way. The events are happened, it’s real events happened in India. Salman Rushdie’s Way of looking , it may be not fair and He says that when we read meta narrative of past we also have to believe.

•    Interesting Symbols in Film

   

 1. Spitoon.

               Normally spittoon is used for spit  but here it used as memory of something but the memory itself become an amnesia. Stroke of it over Saleem become the reason his lost of memory. Amnesia and Memory become debatable point. What we remember, how we remember, what is made to forgotten is very interestingly happening through out literature also.

 2. Magic Realism   

                      Magic Realism is something which is part of people’s life  and that is become  unique style of writing in literature. This style came not from western Writers, who believe in pure realism. They believe that Novel should be written with realism . Canon of literature is when we look at novel it says that it should be reality otherwise it is known as romance.

Magic realism  is part of plot and style of movie. It shows lived experience of people of third world country under colonizers. In movie Parvati who knows magic called by people as witch. Because they think magic is craft of illusion. Parvati used to believe in her magic. She has one disappear box also which she used to save Saleem and her child. There is every time absurdity in marriage. Science and superstition has simultaneously shown in the movie. 

 3.Nose

 

                        Fantastic Elements like  Different sense of smell, children who born on that same night can meet through this sense and only who can call them who is born exact at 12.00 pm of night, others can only participate and in this  Nose is symbolically presented here India’s nose- culture, heritage, history with flight. Father not believe in all that and operation of nose closed the door of that meetings for forever. 

  4. Hybridity

                        Everything not told with cause and effect but, Real world is selling in fantastic world. Blurring reality and magic with so many turns took shape of whole movie. With the end of movie our sense is broken about Saleem’s  blood that he is son of Mumtaz, but in reality he is the son of Mathwood and Vanita; with that ultimate search of self ‘who am I? Truth of oneself? This is ironically presented to literature toward deep question. Another notion of love that Love is not born, it’s made. We can connect it with mythically represent of Yashoda. Mixture of everything is important in Hinduism; idea of  panch mahabhut and panch tatv.

   5. Marxist Voice 

                        Character of Joseph and Marry, speaks very loud of representation or satirical voice of Marxist. Rich-Poor and Independence only for rich people like foolish belief and it resulted into big confusion about someone’s identity. 

   6.Dark and Light

                        One of the British image of India as snack Charmer and apart from that another scene of Pokhran Nuclear test, shows science and blind faith goes together. Duality of India Dark and Light too. Symbolical presence of emergency by Indira Gandhi and worse condition of helpless people.    

 

    4) The texture of the novel :-

                            Midnight’s Children moves at more grandiose levels. The grand destiny of the great Nation is reflected in that of Midnight children, the children born at the midnight hour of August 15th, 1947. The chief protagonist Saleem Sinai finds himself “mysteriously handcuffed to history”. The texture of this novel is allusive, complex and inclusive dense with symbolic, even emblematic overtones.

Multiple identities and shifting shapes of people, things and institutions are vividly depicted epitomized at the stage where the two most important characters Saleem and Shiva become indistinguishable. Even national frontiers and nationalities get blurred. Xenophobic pride like dark mist is cover over realities. It is the composite picture of India where all distinctions of races, communities, classes, regions and religions become non-existent, one qualifying and affecting other.

Rushdie burlesques historical names giving comic slighting effect to high-flying idealism, thus bringing the focus on the mud and froth of real existence. He also gives touches of genial satire on superstitious practices in the belief of astrology and other esoteric devices. At the age of nine Saleem discovers his extraordinary telepathic powers enabling him to read the mind of people around him. At ten he begins communicating with 581 children who are the survivors from 1001 children born at the Great Midnight.

  5) Aesthetic experience :-

                    Independence, Partition, Emergency, the bloodbath and injustice in their wake, and the human vicissitudes in this span ‘pre-1947 to the 1970s’ totalling these grinders of history—Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children, the screenplay and original book written by Salman Rushdie, is a staggering story to film.