Life & Background
Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in June 1947, weeks before independence, into a liberal Muslim family, and was sent to Rugby School in England at thirteen. He read history at King's College, Cambridge, and worked as an advertising copywriter while writing fiction. Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and transformed his career and the field. The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, was banned in India and several other countries, and in February 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death; Rushdie lived for roughly a decade under police protection and pseudonym, and his Japanese translator was murdered and his Norwegian publisher shot. He moved to New York in 2000 and resumed a public life. In August 2022 he was stabbed on stage at a literary event in New York State and lost the sight of one eye; he wrote about the attack in Knife.
Midnight's Children
Saleem Sinai, born at the exact stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, narrates his life to Padma while his body literally cracks apart. Because of the moment of his birth he is telepathically linked to the other midnight's children, each of whom has a gift, and he convenes them in his head as a kind of parliament. His family history runs backwards to his Kashmiri grandfather Aadam Aziz and forwards through Bombay, a swap of babies at birth that means he is not his parents' son, Pakistan, the Bangladesh war, and the magicians' ghetto in Delhi. His nemesis is Shiva, the child swapped with him. The Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi ends the story: the midnight's children are rounded up and sterilised, and Saleem, drained, writes it all down in a pickle factory.
The novel's premise makes a single life the allegory of a nation — Saleem is handcuffed to history, as he puts it — and the technique is deliberately unreliable: he gets dates wrong, admits the errors, and keeps them in, so that the book argues that national history is itself a partial and self-serving narration. Rushdie brings García Márquez's magic realism together with the digressive frame-tale structure of Indian oral narrative and the Arabian Nights, and writes an English deliberately chutnified with Bombay Hindi and Urdu, which broke the decorum of Indian English fiction permanently. The Emergency sections led Indira Gandhi to sue successfully over a single sentence about her son.
Why Rushdie Matters
Midnight's Children is the pivotal novel of Indian writing in English: it won the Booker in 1981 and was voted the Booker of Bookers twice, and it made a generation of Indian novelists publishable internationally, from Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth to Arundhati Roy. It is the standard text for teaching magic realism outside Latin America, allegory of nation, and the unreliable narrator. The Satanic Verses affair is separately examinable as the central modern case in literature, blasphemy, and free expression.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Grimus1975
- Midnight's Children1981
- Shame1983
- The Satanic Verses1988
- Haroun and the Sea of Stories1990
- The Moor's Last Sigh1995
- The Ground Beneath Her Feet1999
- Joseph Anton2012
- Knife2024