Book Review | The Chutnification of History: Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’

I first read Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie 30 years ago, but hadn’t thought about the book again (though in that time I have read most of Rushdie’s glittering oeuvre) until a few months ago, when I heard a “Past Present Future” podcast hosted by the erudite David Runciman, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, in which he situated Midnight’s Children alongside The Handmaid’s Tale, Atlas Shrugged, and The Time Machine in a fascinating series about great political novels. Of particular interest to Runciman is the metaphor of the “body politic” and how it has been used by various thinkers, writers, and philosophers to describe political entities.

Although my memory was jogged by Runciman’s superb analysis and interpretation, I must admit I don’t remember thinking of Midnight’s Children as a political novel when I first read it. I was likely more caught up in Rushdie’s flowing prose and style and his remarkable ability to sustain a narrative over 500 pages than I was with what he was saying about India’s fledgling experiment with democracy.

So in the midst of a chaotic political season and consequential election, news of which daily evoked fear, anxiety, disbelief, and dread, I reread Midnight’s Children. On the one hand it’s quintessential Rushdie: intelligent, witty, full of magical realism seamlessly mixed with actual events, an astonishing cast of characters, and all the sights, sounds, textures, odors, and colors of India; on the other it’s a meditation about a newly independent nation throwing off the shackles of colonial rule and discovering its identity. The novel unfolds over the course of 30+ eventful years, from independence in August 1947 to the late 1970s, and we experience it through Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, making him one of the children whose life is literally intertwined and inseparable from that of the nation.

Saleem is an unusual child, born in Bombay to a Muslim family of some means and with a singular physical trait that runs in the family: a proboscis so prominent that his peers call him Snotnose or Sniffer. This incredible cucumber-like appendage runs constantly, drips, expels, and emits, but what it can’t do, at least on Indian soil, is smell. Only when Saleem is exiled to Pakistan does his sense of smell return, and what he smells most of all is the rot and corruption of Pakistani politics. But this comes much later, well after Saleem discovers another gift — the ability to enter into the thoughts of other people. Saleem’s power is limited in that he can eavesdrop on others but exercise no agency over them. Rushdie writes: “Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head.”

Saleem is only 10 when he also discovers that he can convene, in his head, the other midnight’s children, who number in the hundreds. Each one has a special ability of some kind, but what they can’t do, collectively, any more than the Indian parliament can, is agree on anything or cooperate to achieve a common aim. When Saleem gathers the children into a Midnight Children’s Conference, it’s a disaster, nothing but babbling voices and chaos. As with India, within the MCC there are simply too many factions, languages, religions, animosities, and prejudices. When Saleem attempts to steer this raucous gaggle toward a noble purpose, he’s shouted down, drowned out. Seeing where this is going Saleem pleads: “Brothers, sisters, do not let this happen! Do not permit the endless duality of masses-and-classes, capital-and-labor, them-and-us to come between us.”

One of the MCC voices opposing Saleem belongs to Shiva, a boy born into poverty who possesses tremendous physical strength, knees so powerful they can crush skulls. Shiva is Saleem’s alter ego, ruthless and decisive where Saleem is muddled and indecisive. The wars India fights, in 1962 against the Chinese, and in 1965 with Pakistan over control of Kashmir, are a bleak time for Saleem and a glorious time for Shiva. Caught up in Pakistan’s civil war in 1971, when the eastern part of the country broke away to form Bangladesh, Saleem is nearly destroyed by the atrocities he witnesses; Shiva, by now a Major, isn’t troubled at all.

Then comes the 1975 Emergency when Indira Gandhi suspended the Constitution for two years, and established herself as the embodiment of India. Meanwhile her son, Sanjay, spearheads a project of bio-political forced sterilization. Ostensibly a population control measure for the teeming poor, the program was useful for preventing future generations of undesirables. Although they’re dwindling in number by this time, the remaining midnight’s children are perceived as a threat to the Gandhi dynasty and rounded up and sterilized. With this final assault on his person, Saleem is on the point of cracking, as unsure of his identity as ever.

No essay as brief as this one can come close to describing the twists, turns, and complex layers of this remarkable novel. Midnight’s Children bears the mark of all great literature in that it deserves, and almost demands, to be read again and again. One fascinating aspect to contemplate is how much India has changed since Midnight’s Children was published in 1981. In the 21st century, India’s temperament resembles Shiva’s far more than it does Saleem’s. Although still a nation of staggering poverty and religious strife, India is a player on the global stage, a major trading partner, and regional economic power, its chauvinist Hindu nationalism embodied in the figure of Narendra Modi. And it remains a democracy which recently held one of the largest elections in human history.

David Runciman was struck by Rushdie’s metaphor of “chutnification” — the process of blending many disparate ingredients into a palatable paste — as a way to think about the complex, messy, and painstaking process of building a democracy, of bringing its baying voices and competing interests, feuds and schisms, grievances and hatreds, into coherent form. Like chutney, democracy isn’t made from one stable ingredient, but many ingredients that must be carefully and deliberately blended, stewed, and pickled; it’s not an easy recipe to get right. There’s some irony in the fact that in the four decades since Midnight’s Children appeared, the world’s most famous democracy, the United States, seems to have lost faith in its efficacy and promise.

This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.